sonable doubts, which it
should have been the President's task--as it would certainly have been
Lincoln's--to remove by reason and persuasion. He seems to have failed
to see that he had to do this; and certainly he altogether failed to do
it.

The fears of such men were twofold. They feared that the "rebel" States,
if restored immediately to freedom of action and to the full enjoyment
of their old privileges, would use these advantages for the purpose of
preparing a new secession at some more favourable opportunity. And they
feared that the emancipated Negro would not be safe under a Government
which his old masters controlled.

It may safely be said that both fears were groundless, though they were
both fears which a reasonable man quite intelligibly entertains.
Naturally, the South was sore; no community likes having to admit
defeat. Also, no doubt, the majority of Southerners would have refused
to admit that they were in the wrong in the contest which was now
closed; indeed, it was by pressing this peculiarly tactless question
that Sumner and his friends procured most of their evidence of the
persistence of "disloyalty" in the South. On the other hand, two facts
already enforced in these pages have to be remembered. The first is that
the Confederacy was not in the full sense a nation. Its defenders felt
their defeat as men feel the downfall of a political cause to which they
are attached, not quite as men feel the conquest of their country by
foreigners. The second is that from the first there had been many who,
while admitting the _right_ of secession--and therefore, by
implication, the justice of the Southern cause--had yet doubted its
expediency. It is surely not unnatural to suppose that the disastrous
issue of the experiment had brought a great many round to this point of
view. No doubt there was still a residue--perhaps a large residue--of
quite impenitent "rebels" who were prepared to renew the battle if they
saw a good chance, but the conditions under which the new Southern
Governments had come into existence offered sufficient security against
such men controlling them. Irreconcilables of that type would not have
taken the oath of allegiance, would not have repealed the Ordinances of
Secession or repudiated the Confederate Debt, and, if they had no great
objection to abolishing Slavery, would probably have made it a point of
honour not to do it at Northern dictation. What those who were now
asking for re-a