be
in the end as beneficial to the Southern people themselves, as it is, in
its immediate consequences, just in its retribution for their enormous
crime. In the progress of so tremendous a war, in which, notwithstanding
its origin and cause, the insurrectionary States have strangely been
enabled to command foreign capital, together with the sympathy and even
the indirect assistance of foreign powers, it would have been
shortsighted in the extreme to have anticipated that slavery would
escape attack. Though made the pretext for violence, and prominently put
forward as the justification of rebellion, it was evidently the weakest
point in the rebel cause, and was, therefore, alike from the choice of
the rebels as from the necessity of the Government, destined to become
the central object and pivotal point of the whole contest. Having once
been placed in this position, and fixed in it by the inveterate
enmities of prolonged war, it must from that time abide the arbitrament
of arms. Two years of fierce and calamitous war seem to have brought the
South to this alternative: either to restore the Union with immediate
freedom to the slaves, or to accomplish its dissolution, with a doubtful
and troubled continuance of the system for an uncertain period in the
future.

If the continuance of the struggle thus far has done so much toward a
final settlement of the most troublesome of all questions growing out of
the contest between the North and the South; if it has probably prepared
the way for disposing of slavery in all the States where it now exists,
and even given the African a _status_ as a soldier of the republic; it
has also had an equal effect in other important aspects. It has tended
to develop and settle definitely the political objects and purposes of
the contending parties. With the South, these, to some degree, have
necessarily been changed. The original designs of the rebels, whatever
they may have been in the beginning, have been modified according to the
stringent exigencies of their condition. Their daring and ambitious
plans have been restrained by the public opinion of the civilized world,
and still more by the limitation of their own resources. So long as
their strength was untried, imagination ran riot, and there was no bound
to the magnificence of their bad schemes. But the experience of two
years has taught them that, in their realization, all such wild dreams
are destined to be curtailed within the inexorabl