he North to question
their justice and propriety, unless among those who from the outset
would have been willing to accept Mr. Jefferson Davis as the legitimate
President of the whole country. The terms imposed by Congress really
demand nothing more than that the South should put in practice at home
that Monroe Doctrine of which it has always been so clamorous a
supporter when it could be used for party purposes. The system of
privileged classes which the South proposes to establish is a relic of
old Europe which we think it bad policy to introduce again on this
continent, after our so fresh experience in the war of the evil
consequences that may spring from it. Aristocracy can form no more
intimate and hearty union with democracy under one form than under
another; and unless such a union be accomplished, or we can see some
reasonable hope of its future accomplishment, we are as far from our
object as ever.

The plan proposed disfranchises no one, does not even interfere with
the right of the States to settle the conditions of the franchise. It
merely asks that the privilege shall be alike within reach of all,
attainable on the same terms by those who have shown themselves our
friends as by those whose hands were so lately red with the blood of
our nearest and dearest. We have nothing to do with the number of
actual loyalists at the South, but with the number of possible ones.
The question is not how many now exist there, and what are their
rights, but how many may be made to exist there, and by what means. The
duty of the country to itself transcends all private claims or class
interests. And when people speak of "the South," do they very clearly
define to themselves what they mean by the words? Do they not really
mean, without knowing it, the small body of dangerous men who have
misguided that part of the country to its own ruin, and almost to that
of the Republic? In the mind of our government the South should have no
such narrow meaning. It should see behind the conspirators of yesterday
an innumerable throng of dusky faces, with their dumb appeal, not to
its mercy, its generosity, or even its gratitude, but to its plighted
faith, to the solemn engagement of its chief magistrate and their
martyr. Any theory of the South which leaves out the negro is a scandal
and reproach to our honesty; any attempt at another of those fatal
compromises which ignore his claims upon us, but cannot ignore his
claims upon nature and G