Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war were, we need not say absolutely hopeless,—­because that is the unfounded hypothesis of those whose wish is father to their thought,—­but full of discouragement.  Can we make a safe and honorable peace as the quarrel now stands?  As honor comes before safety, let us look at that first.  We have undertaken to resent a supreme insult, and have had to bear new insults and aggressions, even to the direct menace of our national capital.  The blood which our best and bravest have shed will never sink into the ground until our wrongs are righted, or the power to right them is shown to be insufficient.  If we stop now, all the loss of life has been butchery; if we carry out the intention with which we first resented the outrage, the earth drinks up the blood of our martyrs, and the rose of honor blooms forever where it was shed.  To accept less than indemnity for the past, so far as the wretched kingdom of the conspirators can afford it, and security for the future, would discredit us in our own eyes and in the eyes of those who hate and long to be able to despise us.  But to reward the insults and the robberies we have suffered, by the surrender of our fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on the banks of the national river,—­and this and much more would surely be demanded of us,—­would place the United Fraction of America on a level with the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open to be plundered by all comers!

If we could make a peace without dishonor, could we make one that would be safe and lasting?  We could have an armistice, no doubt, long enough for the flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken bones to knit together.  But could we expect a solid, substantial, enduring peace, in which the grass would have time to grow in the war-paths, and the bruised arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon rusted in our State arsenal, sleeping with their tompions in their mouths, like so many sucking lambs?  It is not the question whether the same set of soldiers would be again summoned to the field.  Let us take it for granted that we have seen enough of the miseries of warfare to last us for a while, and keep us contented with militia musters and sham-fights.  The question is whether we could leave our children and our children’s children with any secure trust that they would not have to go through the very trials we are enduring, probably on a more extended scale and in a more aggravated form.

It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if a peace is established on the basis of Southern independence, the only peace possible, unless we choose to add ourselves to the four millions who already call the Southern whites their masters.  We know what the prevailing—­we do not mean universal—­spirit and temper of those people have been for generations, and what they are like to be after a long and bitter warfare.  We know what their tone is to the people