Because, in our own case, so much pains have been taken to persuade the people of some peculiar sanctity in human property, and to teach them the duty of yielding their moral instincts to their duty as citizens, that even the Free States are by no means ripe for a crusade.  The single and simple duty of the Government is to put down resistance to its legitimate authority; it meddles, and can meddle, with no claim of right except the monstrous one of rebellion.  An absolute ruler in advance of his people has been more than once obliged to abandon his reforms to save his throne; a popular government which should put itself in the same position might endanger not only its own hold upon power, (a minor consideration,) but, in such a crisis as ours, the very frame of society itself.  We must admit that the administration of Mr. Lincoln has sometimes seemed to us over-cautious; that, while it has not scrupled, and wisely has not scrupled, to go behind the letter of the law to its spirit, in dealing with open abettors of treason in the Free States, because they were perverting private right to public wrong, it has been as scrupulous of meddling with a rebel’s legal right in man, though that man were being used for a weapon or a tool against itself, as if to touch it were anathema.  The divinity, which is only a hedge about a king, becomes a wall of triple brass about a slaveholder.

But while we should prefer a more daring, or at least a more definite policy on the part of the Government, we do not think the time has come for turning the war into a crusade.  The example of saints, martyrs, and heroes, who could disregard consequences because the consequences concerned only themselves and their own life, is for the private man, and not for the statesman who is responsible for the complex life of the commonwealth.  To carry on a war we must have money, to get money we must have the confidence of the money-holders, who would not advance a dollar on a pledge of the finest sentiments in the world.  There is something instructive in the fate of that mob of enthusiasts who followed the banner of Walter the Penniless, a name of evil omen.  It saves trouble to say that we must fight the Devil with fire; though, when the Devil is incarnate in human beings, that policy has never been very successful at Smithfield or elsewhere.  But in trying the fiery cure of a servile insurrection, we should run the risk of converting the whole white population of the South into devils of the most desperate sort, with whom any 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