y is already dead, and
cannot be resurrected; that it would take a standing army to maintain
Slavery in the South, if we were to make peace to-day guaranteeing to
the South all their former constitutional privileges, etc. With profound
respect for General Grant as a man and a soldier, we would still prefer
the opinion, on this point, of any earnest member of the young and
feeble anti-slavery party of the South, who resides a few miles away
from the actual reach of the authority and influence of a Federal army.

It is refreshing to know that to this opinion of the victorious general,
of exceedingly doubtful value, upon the specific point in question, he
adds these memorable and patriotic words:

'I never was an Abolitionist, not even what would be called
anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly, and it became
patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South
could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and
that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace established,
I would not, therefore, be willing to see any settlement until this
question is forever settled.'

Almost the only men in the nation who are really competent to judge when
Slavery is really dead, in any region, are those Northern and Western
anti-slavery men who have come into long and deadly collision with its
spirit and power in Kansas and upon the western border of Missouri. Even
Northern and Eastern Abolitionists, better versed perhaps in the theory
of the subject, would prove very incompetent if matched in practical
hostility with slaveholding opinion and might--slaveholding
vindictiveness, cunning, treachery, and recklessness of every
consideration, human or divine, but the gaining of their one end, the
retention of their hold over the slave.

It is again refreshing, in the midst of the open or covert defence and
protection among us of the surviving remnant of Slavery at the South,
granting for the moment that it is now reduced to that, and in the midst
of such easy and over-credulous and mistaken assumptions of its
complete, virtual destruction already, by undoubted friends of freedom,
as in the case of the _Times_ editor, General Grant, and numerous
others, to listen to such hearty utterances, in the keynote of the right
policy, as were made by Secretary Chase in his recent speech at
Cincinnati, and to be able to believe that they foreshadow the course of
the A