In the light of this event the public distress begins to be removed.  What if the brokers’ quotations show our stocks discredited, and the gold dollar costs one hundred and twenty-seven cents?  These tables are fallacious.  Every acre in the Free States gained substantial value on the twenty-second of September.  The cause of disunion and war has been reached, and begun to be removed.  Every man’s house-lot and garden are relieved of the malaria which the purest winds and the strongest sunshine could not penetrate and purge.  The territory of the Union shines to-day with a lustre which every European emigrant can discern from far:  a sign of inmost security and permanence.  Is it feared that taxes will check immigration?  That depends on what the taxes are spent for.  If they go to fill up this yawning Dismal Swamp, which engulfed armies and populations, and created plague, and neutralized hitherto all the vast capabilities of this continent,—­then this taxation, which makes the land wholesome and habitable, and will draw all men unto it, is the best investment in which property-holder ever lodged his earnings.

Whilst we have pointed out the opportuneness of the Proclamation, it remains to be said that the President had no choice.  He might look wistfully for what variety of courses lay open to him:  every line but one was closed up with fire.  This one, too, bristled with danger, but through it was the sole safety.  The measure he has adopted was imperative.  It is wonderful to see the unseasonable senility of what is called the Peace party, through all its masks, blinding their eyes to the main feature of the war, namely, its inevitableness.  The war existed long before the cannonade of Sumter, and could not be postponed.  It might have begun otherwise or elsewhere, but war was in the minds and bones of the combatants, it was written on the iron leaf, and you might as easily dodge gravitation.  If we had consented to a peaceable secession of the Rebels, the divided sentiment of the Border States made peaceable secession impossible, the insatiable temper of the South made it impossible, and the slaves on the border, wherever the border might be, were an incessant fuel to rekindle the fire.  Give the Confederacy New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond, and they would have demanded St. Louis and Baltimore.  Give them these, and they would have insisted on Washington.  Give them Washington, and they would have assumed the army and navy, and, through these, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.  It looks as if the battle-field would have been at least as large in that event as it is now.  The war was formidable, but could not be avoided.  The war was and is an immense mischief, but brought with it the immense benefit of drawing a line, and rallying the Free States to fix it impassably,—­preventing the whole force of Southern connection and influence throughout the North from distracting every city with endless confusion, detaching that force and reducing it to handfuls, and, in the progress of hostilities, disinfecting us of our habitual proclivity, through the affection of trade, and the traditions of the Democratic party, to follow Southern leading.