if the events of these years shall really teach our people to
think--I care not how erroneously at first, for the very exercise of the
God-given faculty will soon teach us to discriminate between true and
false deductions, and restore Thought to her native empire,--then the
blood and treasure we have so lavishly poured out, the trembling and the
mourning, the trials, the toils, and the privations we have suffered,
even the mighty shock which the society of the whole civilized world has
received, will be but a small price to pay for the blessing we shall
have gained, and our future prosperity will have been easily purchased
even at so tremendous a cost. God grant it may be so.

There is no land on earth where treason may work with such impunity as
in our own. And this is owing as well to the greater latitude conceded
to political speculations by the very nature of our system, as to the
fact that our ancestors, having, as they thought, effectually destroyed
all those incentives to treason which exist in more despotic lands, and
little anticipating the new motives which might with changing men and
times spring up in our midst, neglected to ordain the preventives and
remedies for a disease which they imagined could never flourish in our
healthy atmosphere. And while they imposed an inadequate penalty, they
at the same time made so difficult the proof of this the greatest of
crimes, that when at last the monster reared its head and stalked boldly
through the land, there was no power to check or destroy it. It will be
ours to see, in the future, that this impunity is taken away from this
worse than parricide, and that, while a more awful penalty is affixed to
the crime, the plotter shall be as amenable to the law and as easy to be
convicted as he who takes the murderous weapon in his hands.

And for the accomplishment of this and similar ends, doubtless greater
power will be conceded by the States to the Federal Government. The day
has gone by when the people were frightened at the bare idea of giving
to the central Government the necessary power to maintain its own
integrity. The pernicious doctrine of State sovereignty as paramount to
the national, has in this war received its deathblow at the hands of
those who have always been its most zealous supporters. The South,
starting out upon the very basis of this greatest political heresy of
our age, had no sooner taken the initiatory step in severing completely
all the ties an