for peace. "Nothing beyond this,"
exclaimed Mr. Robert M. T. Hunter in a speech delivered at a meeting
in Richmond held immediately after the Peace Conference to which he
had been one of the commissioners,--"Nothing beyond this is needed to
stir the blood of Southern men." In the course of his inflammatory
address Mr. Hunter made the _naive_ confession: "If our people exhibit
the proper spirit they will bring forth the deserters from their
caves; and the skulkers, who are avoiding the perils of the field, will
go forth to share the dangers of their countrymen." The "skulkers" and
"deserters" referred to were no doubt brave men who, having fought as
long as there was hope, were not ambitious to sacrifice their lives to
carry on the shameless bravado of the political leaders of the
Rebellion.

Mr. Hunter spoke with singular intemperance of tone for one who was
usually cool, guarded, and conservative. He was followed by the
_Mephistopheles_ of the Rebellion, the brilliant, learned, sinister
Secretary of State, Judah P. Benjamin. He spoke as one who felt that
he had the _alias_ of an English subject for shelter, or possibly the
Spanish flag for protection, when the worst should come, and thus he
might continue to play the part of Confederate citizen so long as it
favored his ambition and his fortune. He delivered a speech full of
desperate suggestion--so desperate indeed that it re-acted and
injured the cause for which he was demanding harsh sacrifices on the
part of others. He urged upon his hearers that the States of the
Confederacy had nearly seven hundred thousand male slaves of the age
for military service. He gave the assurance that if freedom should
be conceded to these men they would fight in aid of the Rebellion.
Besides advocating a guaranty of emancipation to all these black
men,--for the right to keep whom in slavery the war had been
undertaken,--Mr. Benjamin urged that every bale of cotton, every
hogshead of tobacco, every pound of bacon, every barrel of flour,
should be seized for the benefit of the common cause.

Happily Mr. Benjamin went too far. His over-zeal had tempted him to
prove too much. The Southern people who had desired to build up a
slave empire, and who despised the negro as a freeman, were asked by
Mr. Benjamin to surrender this cherished project, and join with him in
the ignoble design of founding a confederacy whose corner-stone should
rest on hatred of the Northern States, and wh