s, before
us, and must meet it squarely. The pro-slavery Democratic press may
oppose it, as they have been doing, with all the malignity which their
treasonable friendship for the South may inspire; but we have an
inevitable road before us over which we _must_ travel, and it would be
well to consider it betimes, that we may tread it fairly and smoothly,
and not be dragged along shrieking, by a pitiless destiny.

There are two good reasons why we should begin to consider betimes, the
expediency of rewarding our army with Southern lands. The one is the
necessity of a future Northern policy; the other the claim of the army
to such reward.

If when this war is concluded, our Government is to have a policy or a
principle, it should manifestly be that of reinstating itself in power,
in consolidating that power, and in acting as a powerful unity,
according to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. The
CONSTITUTION--bear that word well in mind--the Constitution
which suffers no State to usurp a single power belonging to the General
Government, and which was expressly framed for the purpose of making all
its freemen the citizens of one great nation. Let the reader consult the
Constitution, study its unmistakable plan of national integrity and of
state subordination, and then reflect whether, according to its spirit,
any and every mere state privilege which may be claimed should not yield
to the paramount claim of _the Union_?

If this war has demonstrated any thing, it has been, firstly, the fact
that the South SHALL stay in the Union, and secondly, the folly
of permitting the old Southern system to control us in politics, in
social life, and in every thing. We have had enough of it. Manufactures,
free labor, science, schools, the press, learning, new ideas, social
reforms, the whole _progress_ of the age, inspiring twenty millions, can
no longer be cuffed and scouted in the Senate and snubbed in the _salon_
or public meeting by the private interests of half a million of the most
illiberal and ignorant conservatives in existence. Henceforth the North
must _rule_. 'Must' is a hard nut, but Southern teeth must crack it,
whether they will or no. We may shuffle and quibble, but to this it must
come. Every day of the war renders it more certain. The farm must
encroach on the plantation, the rural nobility give place to the higher
nobility of intelligence; social culture based on mudsills must make way
for the mudsills them