iends at my own home, but I cannot just now be
absent from here so long as a visit there would require.

The meeting is to be of all those who maintain unconditional devotion to
the Union, and I am sure that my old political friends will thank me for
tendering, as I do, the nation's gratitude to those other noble men whom
no partisan malice or partisan hope can make false to the nation's life.

There are those who are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say: You
desire peace, and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we
obtain it? There are but three conceivable ways:

First--to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. This I am trying to do.
Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a
second way is to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If
you are you should say so plainly. If you are not for force nor yet for
dissolution, there only remains some imaginable compromise.

I do not believe that any compromise embracing the maintenance of the
Union is now possible. All that I learn leads to a directly opposite
belief. The strength of the rebellion is its military, its army. That army
dominates all the country and all the people within its range. Any offer
of terms made by any man or men within that range, in opposition to that
army, is simply nothing for the present; because such man or men have no
power whatever to enforce their side of a compromise, if one were made
with them.

To illustrate: Suppose refugees from the South and peace men of the North
get together in convention, and frame and proclaim a compromise embracing
a restoration of the Union. In what way can that compromise be used to
keep Lee's army out of Pennsylvania? Meade's army can keep Lee's army out
of Pennsylvania, and, I think, can ultimately drive it out of existence.
But no paper compromise to which the controllers of Lee's army are not
agreed can at all affect that army. In an effort at such compromise we
would waste time, which the enemy would improve to our disadvantage; and
that would be all.

A compromise, to be effective, must be made either with those who control
the rebel army, or with the people, first liberated from the domination of
that army by the success of our own army. Now allow me to assure you
that no word or intimation from that rebel army, or from any of the men
controlling it, in relation to any peace compromise, has ever come to
my knowledge or belief. All charges