untries abound with his agents. They are able, vigilant, devoted. The
young men of the South burn with the desire to regain what they call
the lost cause; the women are noisily malignant towards the Federal
government. In fact, all the elements of treason and rebellion are there
under the thinnest disguise which necessity can impose.

What, then, is the work before Congress? It is to save the people of the
South from themselves, and the nation from detriment on their account.
Congress must supplant the evident sectional tendencies of the South by
national dispositions and tendencies. It must cause national ideas and
objects to take the lead and control the politics of those States. It
must cease to recognize the old slave-masters as the only competent
persons to rule the South. In a word, it must enfranchise the negro, and
by means of the loyal negroes and the loyal white men of the South build
up a national party there, and in time bridge the chasm between North
and South, so that our country may have a common liberty and a common
civilization. The new wine must be put into new bottles. The lamb may
not be trusted with the wolf. Loyalty is hardly safe with traitors.

Statesmen of America! beware what you do. The ploughshare of rebellion
has gone through the land beam-deep. The soil is in readiness, and the
seed-time has come. Nations, not less than individuals, reap as they
sow. The dreadful calamities of the past few years came not by accident,
nor unbidden, from the ground. You shudder to-day at the harvest of
blood sown in the spring-time of the Republic by your patriot fathers.
The principle of slavery, which they tolerated under the erroneous
impression that it would soon die out, became at last the dominant
principle and power at the South. It early mastered the Constitution,
became superior to the Union, and enthroned itself above the law.

Freedom of speech and of the press it slowly but successfully banished
from the South, dictated its own code of honor and manners to the
nation, brandished the bludgeon and the bowie-knife over Congressional
debate, sapped the foundations of loyalty, dried up the springs
of patriotism, blotted out the testimonies of the fathers against
oppression, padlocked the pulpit, expelled liberty from its literature,
invented nonsensical theories about master-races and slave-races of men,
and in due season produced a Rebellion fierce, foul, and bloody.

This evil principle again seeks