kind of reconciliation, even truce, would be impossible.

We hope and believe that the end of this war will see the snake of
Slavery scotched, if not killed. Events move,--slowly, to be sure, but
they move,--and the thought of the people moves with them unconsciously
to fulfil the purposes of God. Government can do little, perhaps, in
controlling them; but it has no right to the power it holds, if it has
not the insight and the courage to make use of them at the right moment.
If the supreme question should arise of submitting to rebellion or of
crushing it in a common ruin with the wrong that engendered it, we
believe neither the Government nor the people would falter. The time for
answering that question may be nearer than we dream; but meanwhile
we would not hasten what would at best be a terrible necessity, and
justifiable only as such. We believe this war is to prepare the way for
the extinction of Slavery by the action of economical causes, and we
should prefer that solution to one of fire and blood. Already the system
has received a death-blow in Maryland and Missouri. In Western Virginia
it is practically extinct. If the war is carried on with vigor, it
may become so before long in East Tennessee. Texas should be taken
possession of and held at any cost, and a territory capable of supplying
the world with cotton to any conceivable amount thrown open to free
labor.

However regarded, this war into which we have been driven is, in fact, a
war against Slavery. But emancipation is not and could not be the object
of the war. It will be time enough to consider the question as one of
military necessity when our armies advance. To proclaim freedom from the
banks of the Potomac to an unarmed, subject, and dispirited race, when
the whole white population is in arms, would be as futile as impolitic.
Till we can equip our own army, it is idle to talk of arming the slaves;
and to incite them to insurrection without arms, and without the
certainty of support at first and protection afterward, would be merely
sacrificing them to no good end. It is true, the war may lack the ardent
stimulus that would for a time be imparted to it by a direct and obvious
moral purpose. But we doubt whether the impulse thus gained would hold
out long against the immense practical obstacles with which it would be
confronted and the chill of disappointment which is sure to follow an
attempt to realize ideal good by material means. Nor would our gain