of them at the right moment.  If the supreme question should arise of submitting to rebellion or of crushing it in a common ruin with the wrong that engendered it, we believe neither the Government nor the people would falter.  The time for answering that question may be nearer than we dream; but meanwhile we would not hasten what would at best be a terrible necessity, and justifiable only as such.  We believe this war is to prepare the way for the extinction of Slavery by the action of economical causes, and we should prefer that solution to one of fire and blood.  Already the system has received a death-blow in Maryland and Missouri.  In Western Virginia it is practically extinct.  If the war is carried on with vigor, it may become so before long in East Tennessee.  Texas should be taken possession of and held at any cost, and a territory capable of supplying the world with cotton to any conceivable amount thrown open to free labor.

However regarded, this war into which we have been driven is, in fact, a war against Slavery.  But emancipation is not and could not be the object of the war.  It will be time enough to consider the question as one of military necessity when our armies advance.  To proclaim freedom from the banks of the Potomac to an unarmed, subject, and dispirited race, when the whole white population is in arms, would be as futile as impolitic.  Till we can equip our own army, it is idle to talk of arming the slaves; and to incite them to insurrection without arms, and without the certainty of support at first and protection afterward, would be merely sacrificing them to no good end.  It is true, the war may lack the ardent stimulus that would for a time be imparted to it by a direct and obvious moral purpose.  But we doubt whether the impulse thus gained would hold out long against the immense practical obstacles with which it would be confronted and the chill of disappointment which is sure to follow an attempt to realize ideal good by material means.  Nor would our gain in this respect more than compensate for the strength which would be added to the rebels by despair.  It is a question we have hardly the heart to discuss, where our wishes, our hopes, almost our faith in God, are on one side, our understanding and experience on the other.

Nor are we among those who would censure the Government for undue leniency.  If democracy has made us a good-natured people, it is a strong argument in its favor, and we need have no fear that the evil passions of men will ever be buried beyond hope of resurrection.  We would not have this war end without signal and bitter retribution, and especially for all who have been guilty of deliberate treachery; for that is a kind of baseness that should be extirpated at any cost.  If, in moments of impatience, we have wished for something like the rough kingship of Jackson, cooler judgment has convinced us that the strength of democratic institutions will be more triumphantly vindicated by success under an honest Chief Magistrate of average capacity than under a man exceptional, whether by force of character or contempt of precedent.