the people of some peculiar sanctity
in human property, and to teach them the duty of yielding their moral
instincts to their duty as citizens, that even the Free States are by no
means ripe for a crusade. The single and simple duty of the Government
is to put down resistance to its legitimate authority; it meddles,
and can meddle, with no claim of right except the monstrous one of
rebellion. An absolute ruler in advance of his people has been more
than once obliged to abandon his reforms to save his throne; a popular
government which should put itself in the same position might endanger
not only its own hold upon power, (a minor consideration,) but, in such
a crisis as ours, the very frame of society itself. We must admit
that the administration of Mr. Lincoln has sometimes seemed to us
over-cautious; that, while it has not scrupled, and wisely has not
scrupled, to go behind the letter of the law to its spirit, in dealing
with open abettors of treason in the Free States, because they were
perverting private right to public wrong, it has been as scrupulous of
meddling with a rebel's legal right in man, though that man were being
used for a weapon or a tool against itself, as if to touch it were
anathema. The divinity, which is only a hedge about a king, becomes a
wall of triple brass about a slaveholder.

But while we should prefer a more daring, or at least a more definite
policy on the part of the Government, we do not think the time has come
for turning the war into a crusade. The example of saints, martyrs,
and heroes, who could disregard consequences because the consequences
concerned only themselves and their own life, is for the private man,
and not for the statesman who is responsible for the complex life of the
commonwealth. To carry on a war we must have money, to get money we must
have the confidence of the money-holders, who would not advance a dollar
on a pledge of the finest sentiments in the world. There is something
instructive in the fate of that mob of enthusiasts who followed the
banner of Walter the Penniless, a name of evil omen. It saves trouble to
say that we must fight the Devil with fire; though, when the Devil is
incarnate in human beings, that policy has never been very successful
at Smithfield or elsewhere. But in trying the fiery cure of a servile
insurrection, we should run the risk of converting the whole white
population of the South into devils of the most desperate sort, with
whom any