Nobody pretends, of course, that War itself does anything final in the advance of civilization.  War itself is, what the poets call it, a terrible piece of ploughing.  With us, just now, it is subsoil-ploughing, very deep at that.  Stumps and stones have to be heaved out, which had on them the moss and lichens and superficial soil of centuries, and which had fancied, in that heavy semi-consciousness which belongs to stumps and stones, that they were fixed forever.  As the teams and the ploughshares pass over the ground which has lain fallow so long, they leave, God knows, and millions of bleeding hearts know, a very desolate prospect in the upheaved furrows behind them.  It is very black, very rough, very desert to the eye, and in spots it is very bloody.  This is what war does.  So desolate the prospect, that we of the Northern States have certainly a right to thank God that it was not we who called out the ploughmen.

War, in itself, does nothing but plough,—­but immediately on the end of the war, in any locality, he who succeeds begins on the harrowing and the planting.  And because God is, and directs all such affairs, it is wonderful to see how short is the June which in His world covers all such furrows as His ploughmen make with new beauty.  It is to the methods of that new harvest that the President has boldly led our attention in his admirable Proclamation of Amnesty.  It is to the details of it that each loyal man has to look already.  It is but a few weeks since we heard a sentimental grumbler, at a public meeting, lamenting over the discomforts of the freed slaves in the Southwest, as he compared them with their lost paradise.  Men of his type, to whom the present is always worse than the past, succeed in persuading themselves that the incidental hardships of transition are to be taken as the type of a whole future.  And so this apostle of discontent really believed that the condition of the fifty thousand freed slaves of the Mississippi, in the hands of such men as Grant, and Eliot, and Yeatman, and Wheelock, and Forman, and Fiske, and Howard, was really going to be worse than it was under the lashes of Legree, or at the auction-block of New Orleans.  The more manly, as the more philosophical way of looking at the transition, is to discover the shortest path leading to that future, which, without such a transition, cannot come.

The President, with courage which does him infinite honor, leads the way to this future.  His Proclamation is really a rallying-cry to all true men and women, whether they are living at the North or at the South, to take hold and work for its accomplishment.  With an army posted in each of the revolted States, with more than one of them completely under National control, he considers that the time for planting has come.  He is no such idealist or sentimentalist as to leave these new-made furrows, so terribly torn up in three years of war, to renew their own verdure by any mere spontaneous vegetation.