ondition. On the climbing scale
of progress, he is just up to war, and has never appeared to such
advantage as in the last twelve-month. It does not suit us. We are
advanced some ages on the war-state,--to trade, art, and general
cultivation. His laborer works for him at home, so that he loses no
labor by the war. All our soldiers are laborers; so that the South, with
its inferior numbers, is almost on a footing in effective war-population
with the North. Again, as long as we fight without any affirmative step
taken by the Government, any word intimating forfeiture in the rebel
States of their old privileges under the law, they and we fight on the
same side, for Slavery. Again, if we conquer the enemy,--what then? We
shall still have to keep him under, and it will cost as much to hold him
down as it did to get him down. Then comes the summer, and the fever
will drive our soldiers home; next winter, we must begin at the
beginning, and conquer him over again. What use, then, to take a fort,
or a privateer, or get possession of an inlet, or to capture a regiment
of rebels?

But one weapon we hold which is sure. Congress can, by edict, as a part
of the military defence which it is the duty of Congress to provide,
abolish slavery, and pay for such slaves as we ought to pay for. Then
the slaves near our armies will come to us: those in the interior will
know in a week what their rights are, and will, where opportunity
offers, prepare to take them. Instantly, the armies that now confront
you must run home to protect their estates, and must stay there, and
your enemies will disappear.

There can be no safety until this step is taken. We fancy that the
endless debate, emphasized by the crime and by the cannons of this war,
has brought the Free States to some conviction that it can never go well
with us whilst this mischief of Slavery remains in our politics, and
that by concert or by might we must put an end to it. But we have too
much experience of the futility of an easy reliance on the momentary
good dispositions of the public. There does exist, perhaps, a popular
will that the Union shall not be broken,--that our trade, and therefore
our laws, must have the whole breadth of the continent, and from Canada
to the Gulf. But, since this is the rooted belief and will of the
people, so much the more are they in danger, when impatient of defeats,
or impatient of taxes, to go with a rush for some peace, and what kind
of peace shal