A more important topic, and one so deeply concerning the most vital prosperity of the United States, was never before submitted to the consideration of her citizens.  If entertained by Government and the people on a great, enterprising, and vigorous scale, as such schemes were planned and executed by the giant minds of antiquity, it may be made productive of such vast benefits, that in a few years at most, the millions of Americans may look back to this war as one of the greatest blessings that ever befell humanity, and Jefferson Davis and his coadjutors be regarded as the blind implements by which God advanced human progress, as it had never before advanced at one stride.  But to effect this, it should be planned and executed as a great, harmonious, and centrally powerful scheme, not be tinkered over and frittered away by all the petty doughfaces in every village.  In great emergencies, great acts are required.

It is evident that the only certain road to Union-izing the South is, to plant in it colonies of Northern men.  Thousands, hundreds of thousands now in the army, would gladly remain in the land of tobacco or of cotton, if Government would only provide them with the land whereon to live.  Were they thus settled, and were every slave in the South emancipated by the chances of war, there would be no danger to apprehend as to the future of the latter.  Give a Yankee a fat farm in Dixie, and we may rely upon it that although a Southern nabob may not know how to get work out of a ‘free nigger’, the Northerner will contrive to persuade Cuffy to become industrious.  We have somewhere heard of a Vermonter, who taught ground-hogs or ‘wood-chucks’ to plant corn for him; the story has its application.  Were Cuffy ten times as lazy as he is, the free farmer would contrive to get him to work.  And in view of this, I am not sorry that the Legislatures of the border wheat States are passing laws to prevent slaves from entering their territories.  The mission of the black is to labor as a free man in the South, under the farmer, until capable of being a farmer on his own account.

The manner and method of colonizing free labor in the South deserves very serious consideration, and is, it may be presumed, receiving it at the hands of Government, in anticipation of further developments in this direction.  We trust, however, that the Administration will lead, as rapidly as possible, in this matter, and that the President will soon make it the subject of a Message as significant and as noble as that wherein this country first stood committed by its chief officer to Emancipation, the noblest document which ever passed from president or potentate to the people; a paper which, in the eyes of future ages, will cast Magna Charta itself into the shade, and rank with the glorious manumission of the Emperor of Russia.