a right to thank God that it was not we who called out
the ploughmen.

War, in itself, does nothing but plough,--but immediately on the end of
the war, in any locality, he who succeeds begins on the harrowing and
the planting. And because God is, and directs all such affairs, it is
wonderful to see how short is the June which in His world covers all
such furrows as His ploughmen make with new beauty. It is to the methods
of that new harvest that the President has boldly led our attention in
his admirable Proclamation of Amnesty. It is to the details of it that
each loyal man has to look already. It is but a few weeks since we heard
a sentimental grumbler, at a public meeting, lamenting over the
discomforts of the freed slaves in the Southwest, as he compared them
with their lost paradise. Men of his type, to whom the present is always
worse than the past, succeed in persuading themselves that the
incidental hardships of transition are to be taken as the type of a
whole future. And so this apostle of discontent really believed that the
condition of the fifty thousand freed slaves of the Mississippi, in the
hands of such men as Grant, and Eliot, and Yeatman, and Wheelock, and
Forman, and Fiske, and Howard, was really going to be worse than it was
under the lashes of Legree, or at the auction-block of New Orleans. The
more manly, as the more philosophical way of looking at the transition,
is to discover the shortest path leading to that future, which, without
such a transition, cannot come.

The President, with courage which does him infinite honor, leads the way
to this future. His Proclamation is really a rallying-cry to all true
men and women, whether they are living at the North or at the South, to
take hold and work for its accomplishment. With an army posted in each
of the revolted States, with more than one of them completely under
National control, he considers that the time for planting has come. He
is no such idealist or sentimentalist as to leave these new-made
furrows, so terribly torn up in three years of war, to renew their own
verdure by any mere spontaneous vegetation.

Practical as the President always is, he is sublimely practical in the
Proclamation. "Let us make good out of this evil as quickly as we can,"
he says; "let peace bring in plenty as quickly as she can." To bring
this about, he promises the strong arm of the nation to protect anything
which shall show itself worth protecting, in the way of