rder, supporting an army and navy under regularly commissioned
officers, and carrying on war as a sovereign nation--in such a
territorial rebellion no one in particular can be accused and punished
as a traitor. The rebellion is not the work of a few ambitious or
reckless leaders, but of the people, and the responsibility of the
crime, whether civil or military, is not individual, but common to the
whole territorial people engaged in it; and seven millions, or the half
of them, are too many to ban to exile, or even to disfranchise Their
defeat and the failure of their cause must be their punishment. The
interest of the country, as well the sentiment of the civilized
world--it might almost be said the law of nations--demands their
permission to return to their allegiance, to be treated according to
their future merits, as an integral portion of the American people.

The sentiment of the civilized world has much relaxed from its former
severity toward political offenders. It regards with horror the savage
cruelties of Great Britain to the unfortunate Jacobites, after their
defeat under Charles Edward, at Culloden, in 1746, their barbarous
treatment of the United Irishmen in 1798, and her brutality to the
mutinous Hindoos in 1857-'58; the harshness of Russia toward the
insurgent Poles, defeated in their mad attempts to recover their lost
nationality; the severity of Austria, under Haynau, toward the defeated
Magyars. The liberal press kept up for years, especially in England
and the United States, a perpetual howl against the Papal and
Neapolitan governments for arresting and imprisoning men who conspired
to overthrow them. Louis Kossuth was no less a traitor than Jefferson
Davis, and yet the United States solicited his release from a Turkish
prison, and sent a national ship to bring him hither as the nation's
guest. The people of the United States have held from the first "the
right of insurrection," and have given their moral support to every
insurrection in the Old or New World they discovered, and for them to
treat with severity any portion of the Southern secessionists, who, at
the very worst, only acted on the principles the nation had uniformly
avowed and pronounced sacred, would be regarded, and justly, by the
civilized world as little less than infamous.

Not only the fair fame, but the interest of the Union forbids any
severity toward the people lately in arms against the government. The
interest of the nat