in
this respect more than compensate for the strength which would be added
to the rebels by despair. It is a question we have hardly the heart to
discuss, where our wishes, our hopes, almost our faith in God, are on
one side, our understanding and experience on the other.

Nor are we among those who would censure the Government for undue
leniency. If democracy has made us a good-natured people, it is a strong
argument in its favor, and we need have no fear that the evil passions
of men will ever be buried beyond hope of resurrection. We would not
have this war end without signal and bitter retribution, and especially
for all who have been guilty of deliberate treachery; for that is a kind
of baseness that should be extirpated at any cost. If, in moments of
impatience, we have wished for something like the rough kingship
of Jackson, cooler judgment has convinced us that the strength of
democratic institutions will be more triumphantly vindicated by success
under an honest Chief Magistrate of average capacity than under a man
exceptional, whether by force of character or contempt of precedent.

Is this, then, to be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel
about Cotton? Shall there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle
fanaticism? Are we to have no Cause like that for which our English
republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity
on the scaffold?--no Cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a
Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen who look
on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted
for a nobler service than ours. Not only is it national life and a
foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle
of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of
government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of
God's own hand. If democracy shall prove itself capable of having
raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can
appreciate this cardinal truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great
for its defence and establishment, then democracy will have vindicated
itself beyond all chance of future cavil. Here, we think, is a Cause the
experience of whose vicissitudes and the grandeur of whose triumph
will be able to give us heroes and statesmen. The Slave-Power must be
humbled, must be punished,--so humbled and so punished as to be a
warning forever; but Slavery is a