fe in a fit of drunkenness applies for pardon
to the Executive. The Executive, Governor or President, as the case may
be, may surely then impose that condition before commuting the sentence
or releasing the prisoner. Now the Nation stands toward the Rebels in a
like attitude. It may be good policy to take them back as fast as they
submit, it may be Christian magnanimity to make the way as easy as
possible for their return, but they have no right to come back to
anything but a prison and hard labor for life. Many of them have trebly
forfeited their lives,--as traitors, as deserters from the naval and
military service, and as paroled prisoners who have broken their parole.
And therefore we say, since we cannot deal with all the individuals,
we must deal with the masses, and that in their corporate capacity. If
South Carolina is a sovereign State, is in the Union as a feudal chief
in his king's court, with power to carry from York to Lancaster and from
Lancaster to York his subject vassals, then South Carolina has dared the
hazard of rebellion, and her political head is forfeit.

It is next to be asked, what these conditions are to be. And that is
not to be answered in a breath. That they can have but one result,
emancipation, is a foregone conclusion; but the mode of reaching it is
not so easily determined. A cotton-loaded ship took fire at sea. It
would have been easy to pump in water enough to drown the fire. But the
captain said, "No," for that would swell the bales to such an extent
as to open every seam and start every timber. So with, the ship now
carrying King Cotton: you may indeed quench the fire, but you may
possibly turn the ship inside out into the bargain.

But something we have a right to insist on. We have it, over and above
the Constitutional right shown just now, upon the broad principle of
necessity. Slavery has proved itself a nuisance. Just as we say to the
owner of a bone-boiling establishment, "You poison the air; we cannot
live here; you must go farther off,"--and if a fever break out which can
be clearly traced to that source, we say it emphatically: so now Slavery
having proved itself pestilential, we say, "March!"

We are not disposed, _a la_ Staten Island, to burn down our
yellow-feverish neighbor's house. We will give everybody time to pack
up. We will make up a little purse for any specially hard case which the
removal may show. But stay and be plague-stricken we will no longer; nor
are we d