ustain them. Let them go, then. You have
destroyed them. And the nation governs you by proconsuls." But the
nation has no such desire to deal harshly with these people. The nation
knows that more than half of them were never regarded as people at
home,--that they had no more to do with the Rebellion than had the oxen
with which they labored. The nation knows that of the rest of the
Southern people literally only a handful professed power in the State.
The nation knows, therefore, that what pretended to be a union of
republics was, really, to take Gouverneur Morris's phrase, a union of
republics with oligarchies,--seventeen republics united to fourteen
oligarchies, when this thing began. The nation knows that the fourteen
will be happier, stronger, more prosperous than ever, when their people
have the rights of which they are partly conscious,--when they also
become republics. The nation means to carry out the constitutional
guaranty, and give them the republican government which under the
Constitution belongs to every State in the Union. The nation looks
forward to prosperous centuries, in which these States, with these
people and the descendants of these people, shall be united in one
nation with the republics which have been true to the nation. For all
these reasons the nation has no thought of insisting on its rights as
against Rebel States. It has no thunders of vengeance except for those
who have led in these iniquities. For the people who have been misled it
has pardon, protection, encouragement, and hope. It can afford to be
generous. And at the President's hands it makes the offer which will be
received.

* * * * *

We say this offer will be received. We know very well the difficulty
with which an opinion long branded with ignominy makes head in countries
where there is no press, where there is no free speech, where there are
no large cities. Excepting Louisiana, the Southern States have none of
these. And the "peculiar institutions" throw the control of what is
called opinion more completely into the hands of a very small class of
men, we might almost say a very small knot of men, than in any other
oligarchy which we remember in modern history. It is in considering this
very difficulty that we recognize the wisdom of the President's
Proclamation. He is conscious of the difficulty, and has placed his
minimum of loyal inhabitants at a very low point, that, even in the
hardest case