If Slavery is our disease, the Abolition of Slavery is our remedy.  Our bayonets only cupped and scored the patient, our war-measures in and out of Congress only worked dynamically against other war-measures far more dogged and desperate than our own.  The sentence of Emancipation is the specific whose operation will be vital, by effecting an alteration in the system, and soon annihilating that condition of the blood which feeds our fevers and rushes in disgusting blotches to the face.  “No,”—­a Northern minority still says,—­“every fever has its term; only watch your self-limiting disease, keep the patient from getting too much hurt during his delirium, and he will be on ’Change before long.”

No doubt of that.  He loves to be on ’Change; of all the places in the country, out of his own patriarchal neighborhoods, not even Saratoga and Newport were ever so exhilarating to him as Wall Street and State Street, and he longs to be well enough to infest his whilom haunts.  Slavery is a self-limited disease, for it suffers nothing but itself to impose its limits.  In that sense the North would soon have his old crony on the pavement again, with one yellow finger in his button-hole, and another nervously playing at a trigger behind the back.  For the North was paying roundly in men and dollars to renew that pleasurable intercourse, to get the dear old soul out again as little dilapidated as possible, with as much of the old immunities and elasticities preserved as an attack so violent would allow.

The President said to the deputation of Quakers, “Where the Constitution cannot yet go, a proclamation cannot.”  This was accepted by a portion of the North as another compact expression of Presidential wisdom.  It was the common sense, curtly and neatly put, upon which our armies waited, and for whose cold and bleached utterances our glorious young men were sent home from Washington by rail in coffins, red receipts of Slavery to acknowledge Northern indecision.  It was the kind of common sense which, after every family-tomb has got its tenant, and wives, mothers, sisters tears to be their bread and meat continually, would have jogged on ’Change snugly some fine morning arm in arm with the murderer of their noble dead.

For, though neither the Constitution nor a proclamation can quite yet go down practically into Slavery, Slavery might come up here to find the Constitution in its old place at the Potomac ferry, and without a toll or pike to heed.

It seemed so sensible to say, that, where one document cannot go, another cannot!  And yet it depends upon what is in the document.  If the Constitution could go South now, it would be the last thing we should want to send, at this stage of the national malady.  It contains the immunity out of which the malady has flamed.  Its very neutrality is the best protection which a conquered South could have, and a moral triumph that would richly compensate it for a military defeat.  Would it not have been quite as sagacious, and equally aphoristic, if the President had said, “Where a proclamation cannot go, the Constitution never can again”?  He has said it!  And if the proclamation goes first, the Constitution will follow to bless and to save.