el armies, should be
emancipated, as required by Congress, and employed, at reasonable wages,
in some useful labor in aid of the Union cause. In this way, the rebel
whites and masters must soon, to a vast extent, leave the army, to raise
the provisions now supplied by their slaves, and the war thus much more
speedily be brought to a successful conclusion. By paper edicts I mean
those designed to operate as judgments or sentences, without capture or
conquest, and not those announced under the acts of Congress, in
advance, but only to become operative and consummated in the contingency
of capture or conquest. The unconditional friends of the Union should
not only adhere to the Constitution as the bulwark of our cause, but
will find in that great instrument the most ample power to suppress the
rebellion. It is the rebels who are striving to overthrow the
Constitution, and we who are resolved to maintain and enforce it, in war
and in peace, as 'the _supreme_ law of the land,' in _every State_, from
the lakes to the gulf, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

It is vain to deny the prejudice in the North against the negro race,
constantly increasing as the numbers multiply, accompanied by the stern
refusal of social or political equality with the negro, and the serious
apprehension among their working classes of the degradation of labor by
negro association, and the reduction of wages to a few cents a day by
negro competition--all demonstrating, as a question of interest, as well
as of humanity, that it is best for them, as for us, that the
separation, though necessarily gradual and voluntary, must be complete
and eternal.

Wherever the vote of the people of any State of the North has been taken
on this question, it has been uniformly for the exclusion of the free
negro race. In the midst of the excitement of the slavery question in
Kansas, when the republicans acted alone upon the question of the
adoption of their celebrated Topeka constitution, they submitted the
free negro question to a distinct vote of the people, which was almost
unanimous for their exclusion. The recent similar overwhelming vote, to
the same effect, of the people of Illinois, is another clear test of the
present sentiment of the nation. That sentiment is this: that the negro,
although to be regarded as a man, and treated with humanity, belongs, as
they believe, to an inferior race, communion or association with whom is
not desired by the whites. Thos