be cheated of half his scanty earnings by the nation
for which he dies. The Rebels may be induced to concede the negro the
rights of war, when we grant him the ordinary rights of peace, namely,
to be paid the price agreed upon. Jefferson Davis and the London
"Times"--one-half whose stock-in-trade is "the inveterate meanness of
the Yankee"--will hardly be converted to sound morals by the rebukes of
an administration which allows its Secretary of War to promise a black
soldier thirteen dollars a month, pay him seven, and shoot him if he
grumbles. From this crowning injustice the regular army, and, indeed,
the whole army, is clear; to civilians alone belongs this carnival of
fraud.

If, in some instances, terrible injustice has been done to the black
soldiers in their military treatment also, it has not been only, or
chiefly, under regular officers. Against the cruel fatigue duty imposed
upon them last summer, in the Department of the South, for instance,
must be set the more disastrous mismanagements of the Department of the
Gulf,--the only place from which we now hear the old stories of disease
and desertion,--all dating back to the astonishing blunder of organizing
the colored regiments of half-size at the outset, with a full complement
of officers. This measure, however agreeable it might have been to the
horde of aspirants for commissions, was in itself calculated to destroy
all self-respect in the soldiers, being based on the utterly baseless
assumption that they required twice as many officers as whites, and was
foredoomed to failure, because no _esprit de corps_ can be created in a
regiment which is from the first insignificant in respect to size. It is
scarcely conceivable that any regular officer should have honestly
fallen into such an error as this; and it is very certain that the
wisest suggestions and the most efficient action have proceeded, since
the beginning, from them. It will be sufficient to mention the names of
Major-General Hunter, Brigadier-General Phelps, and Adjutant-General
Thomas; and one there is whose crowning merits deserve a tribute
distinct even from these.

When some future Bancroft or Motley writes with philosophic brain and
poet's hand the story of the Great Civil War, he will find the
transition to a new era in our nation's history to have been fitly
marked by one festal day,--that of the announcement of the President's
Proclamation, upon Port-Royal Island, on the first of January, 186