t from courage and
fidelity to principle. A people so boyish and conceited as the
Southerners have always shown themselves to be, unwilling ever to deal
with facts, but only with their own imagination of them, would be sure
to interpret indecision as cowardice, if not as an unwilling tribute to
that superiority of which men who really possess it are the last to
boast. They have learned nothing from the war but to hate the men who
subdued them, and to misinterpret and misrepresent the causes of their
subduing; and even now, when a feeling has been steadily growing in the
rest of the country for the last nine months deeper and more intense
than any during the war, because mixed with an angry sense of
unexpected and treacherous disappointment, instead of setting their
strength to the rebuilding of their shattered social fabric, they are
waiting, as they waited four years ago, for a division in the North
which will never come, and hailing in Andrew Johnson a scourge of God
who is to avenge them in the desolation of our cities! Is it not time
that these men were transplanted at least into the nineteenth century,
and, if they cannot be suddenly Americanized, made to understand
something of the country which was too good for them, even though at
the cost of a rude shock to their childish self-conceit? Is that a
properly reconstructed Union in the Southern half of which no Northern
man's life is safe except at the sacrifice of his conscience, his
freedom of speech, of everything but his love of money? To our minds
the providential purpose of this intervention of Mr. Johnson in our
affairs is to warn us of the solemn duty that lies upon us in this
single crisis of our history, when the chance is offered us of stamping
our future with greatness or contempt, and which requires something
like statesmanship in the people themselves, as well as in those who
act for them. The South insisted upon war, and has had enough of it; it
is now our turn to insist that the peace we have conquered shall be so
settled as to make war impossible for the future.

But how is this to be done? The road to it is a very plain one. We
shall gain all we want if we make the South really prosperous; for with
prosperity will come roads, schools, churches, printing presses,
industry, thrift, intelligence, and security of life and property.
Hitherto the prosperity of the South has been factitious; it has been a
prosperity of the Middle Ages, keeping the many po