, retire upon their dignity and hide their
time. They are, on the contrary, an enterprising gang of desperadoes,
who for the nonce may find it convenient to play the _role_ of high life
and dignified pretension, but who, on the slightest change of
circumstances, are ready for any shift, any seeming degradation or
humiliation, any temporary lowering of their claims, in order to rise
higher on the next wave. There is also enough of the savage and
barbarous element of character remaining in the Southern bogus chivalry
to make them, like the Chinaman or the Japanese, incapable of
appreciating magnanimity. All conciliation or clemency will be construed
into weakness; generosity and forbearance into poltroonery. These are
sad truths; but being truths, the failure to know them in season may
cost us another and a more desperate war, with more doubtful and
dangerous results.

Let us once surrender, through national verdancy, sentimental
commiseration, misunderstanding of the nature and purposes of our enemy,
or any or all of these causes combined with others, the dear-bought
advantages we have won, and disasters untold involve the future of the
land. Terrible beyond description will be, in that event, the condition
of the Union and emancipationist party now incipiently developing itself
at the South;--abandoned and deserted by the withdrawal of the actual
presence and protection of Northern arms. No barbarism on earth, no
savagism extant, is so barbarous or so savage as the ruthless vengeance
with which this hybrid civilization of the South is ready at any time to
visit the crime of abolitionism; and seven times hotter than usual will
the furnace of their wrath be heated against Southern men who under the
aegis of Northern protection shall have exhibited some sympathy with
freedom.

That a powerful Northern party will immediately arise in behalf of the
simple readmission of the Southern States, upon precisely the old basis,
when the war shall end by the suppression of the rebellion, is certain.
The existence of such a party will rest, in part, upon a real sympathy
with the South and the rebellion; partly upon interested political
motives of a more ordinary and short-sighted character; and, in still
greater part than either of these, upon the easy credence and
insufficient information of the great mass of the Northern people;
somewhat, indeed, upon a magnanimity highly creditable to their
character as men, but unwise and danger