but hatred and eternal alienation.  Men do not change in this way, and we may be quite sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day or other prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which the plotters have managed with such consummate skill.  It is hardly to be doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in Charleston, in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of deliverance, and for whom the coming of “our good friends, the enemies,” as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels to the prison-cells of Paul and Silas.  But there is no need of depending on the aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or be they few; there is material power enough in the North, if there be the will to use it, to overrun and by degrees to recolonize the South, and it is far from impossible that some such process may be a part of the mechanism of its new birth, spreading from various centres of organization, on the plan which Nature follows when she would fill a half-finished tissue with blood-vessels or change a temporary cartilage into bone.

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!