s of the secession treason in the Free States have done their
best to bewilder the public mind and to give factitious prestige to a
conspiracy against free government and civilization by talking about
the _right_ of revolution, as if it were some acknowledged principle of
the Law of Nations. There is a right and sometimes a duty of rebellion,
as there is also a right and sometimes a duty of hanging men for it;
but rebellion continues to be rebellion until it has accomplished its
object and secured the acknowledgment of it from the other party to the
quarrel, and from the world at large. The Republican Party in the
November elections had really effected a peaceful revolution, had
emancipated the country from the tyranny of an oligarchy which had
abused the functions of the Government almost from the time of its
establishment, to the advancement of their own selfish aims and
interests; and it was this legitimate change of rulers and of national
policy by constitutional means which the Secessionists intended to
prevent. To put the matter in plain English, they resolved to treat the
people of the United States, in the exercise of their undoubted and
lawful authority, as rebels, and resorted to their usual policy of
intimidation in order to subdue them. Either this magnificent empire
should be their plantation, or it should perish. This was the view even
of what were called the moderate slaveholders of the Border States; and
all the so-called compromises and plans of reconstruction that were
thrown into the caldron where the hell-broth of anarchy was brewing had
this extent, no more,--What terms of _submission_ would the people make
with their natural masters? Whatever other result may have come of the
long debates in Congress and elsewhere, they have at least convinced
the people of the Free States that there can be no such thing as a
moderate slaveholder,--that moderation and slavery can no more coexist
than Floyd and honesty, or Anderson and treason.

We believe, then, that conciliation was from the first impossible,--that
to attempt it was unwise, because it put the party of law and loyalty
in the wrong,--and that, if it was done as a mere matter of policy in
order to gain time, it was a still greater mistake, because it was the
rebels only who could profit by it in consolidating their organization,
while the seeming gain of a few days or weeks was a loss to the
Government, whose great advantage was in an administrative s