The only basis of peace with the North, as the South declares, is Disunion; and they do most certainly mean it.  No giving up the slave question, no enforcing of fugitive slave laws; no, not the hanging of Messrs. Garrison and Phillips, or any other punishment of all Emancipationists—­as clamored for by thousands of trembling cowards—­would be of any avail.  It is disunion or nothing—­and disunion they can not have.  There shall be no disunion, no settlement of any thing on any basis but the Union.  Richmond papers, after the battle of Pittsburgh Landing, proposed peace and separation.  They do not know us.  The North was never so determined to push on as now; never so eager for battle or for sacrifices.  If the South is in earnest, so are we; if they have deaths to avenge, so have we; if they cry for war to the knife, so surely as God lives they can have it in full measure.  For thirty years the blazing straw of Southern insult has been heaped on the Northern steel; and now that the latter is red-hot, it shall scorch and sear ere it cools, and they who heated it shall feel it.

We may as well make up our minds to it first as last, that we must at every effort and at any cost, conquer this rebellion.  There is no alternative.  This done, the great question which remains to settle, is, how shall we manage the conquered provinces?  There are fearful obstacles in the way; great difficulties, such as no one has as yet calmly realized; difficulties at home and abroad.  We have a fierce and discontented population to keep under; increased expenses in every department of government; but it is needless to sum them up.  The first and most apparent difficulty is that involved in the form of government to be adopted.  As the rebellious States have, by the mere act of secession, forfeited all State rights, and thereby reduced themselves to territories, this question would seem to settle itself without difficulty, were it not that a vast body of the ever-mischief-making, ever-meddling, and never-contented politicians (who continue to believe that the millennium would at once arrive were Emancipation only extinguished) cry out against this measure as an infringement of those Southern rights which are so dear to them.  They argue and hope in vain.  Never more will the South come back to be served and toadied to by them as of old; never more will they receive contemptuous patronage and dishonorable honors.  It is all passed.  Those who look deepest into this battle, and into the future, see a resistance, grim and terrible, to the death; and one which will call for the strictest and sternest watch and ward.  It will only be by putting fresh life and fresh blood into Secessia, that union can be practically realized.  Out of the old Southern stock but little can be made.  A great portion must be kept under by the strong hand; a part may be induced to consult its own interests, and reform.  But the great future of the South, and the great hope of a revived and improved Union will be found in colonizing certain portions of the conquered territory with free white labor.