s?" We have no longer the
right to say that the difficult questions will settle themselves. We
must not say that Providence will take care of them. We must not say
that we are trying experiments. The time for all this has gone by. We
have won victories. We are going to win more. We must show we know how
to use them.

As our armies advance, for instance, very considerable regions of
territory come, for the time, under the military government of the
United States. If we painted a map of the country, giving to the Loyal
States each its individual chosen color, and to the Rebel States their
favorite Red or Black, we should find that the latter were surrounded by
a strip of that circumambient and eternal Blue which indicates the love
and the strength of the National Government. The strip is here broad,
and there narrow. It is broad in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It
stretches up in a narrow line along the Sea Islands and the Atlantic
coast. What do we mean to do with this strip, while it is in the special
charge of the nation? Do we mean to leave it to the chapter of
accidents, as we have done? A few charitable organizations have kept the
Sea Islands along, so that they are a range of flourishing plantations,
as they used to be. A masterly inactivity, on the other hand, leaves the
northern counties of Virginia, this summer, within the very sight of the
Capitol, to be the desert and disgrace which they were when they were
the scenes of actual war. A handful of banditti rides through them when
it chooses, and even insults the communications of our largest army. The
people of that State are permitted to point at this desolation, and to
say that such are the consequences of Federal victories. For another
instance, take the "Four-Million question." These four million negroes,
from whose position the war has sprung, are now almost all set free, in
law. A very large number of them--possibly a quarter part of them--are
free in fact. One hundred and thirty thousand of them are in the
national army. With regard to these men the question is not, "What are
you going to do with them when the war is done?" but, "What will you do
with them to-day and to-morrow?" Your duty is to use victory in the
moment of victory. You are not to wait for its last ramification before
you lead in peace and plenty, which ought to follow close in its first
footsteps.

To an observing and sensitive nation it seems as if all these questions,
and many o