before were deadly.  She nourished death in her bosom.  The greater her secular prosperity, the more sure was her ruin.  Every year of delay but made the change more terrible.  Now, by an earthquake, the evil is shaken down.  And her own historians, in a better day, shall write, that from the day the sword cut off the cancer, she began to find her health.  What, then, shall hinder the rebuilding of the Republic?  The evil spirit is cast out:  why should not this nation cease to wander among tombs, cutting itself?  Why should it not come, clothed and in its right mind, to “sit at the feet of Jesus”?  Is it feared that the government will oppress the conquered States?  What possible motive has the government to narrow the base of that pyramid on which its own permanence depends?  Is it feared that the rights of the States will be withheld?  The South is not more jealous of State rights than the North.  State rights from the earliest colonial days have been the peculiar pride and jealousy of New England.  In every stage of national formation, it was peculiarly Northern, and not Southern, statesmen that guarded State rights as we were forming the Constitution.  But once united, the loyal States gave up forever that which had been delegated to the national government.  And now, in the hour of victory, the loyal States do not mean to trench upon Southern State rights.  They will not do it, nor suffer it to be done.  There is not to be one rule for high latitudes and another for low.  We take nothing from the Southern States that has not already been taken from the Northern.  The South shall have just those rights that every eastern, every middle, every western State has—­no more, no less.  We are not seeking our own aggrandizement by impoverishing the South.  Its prosperity is an indispensable element of our own.

We have shown, by all that we have suffered in war, how great is our estimate of the Southern States of this Union; and we will measure that estimate, now, in peace, by still greater exertions for their rebuilding.  Will reflecting men not perceive, then, the wisdom of accepting established facts, and, with alacrity of enterprise, begin to retrieve the past?  Slavery cannot come back.  It is the interest, therefore, of every man to hasten its end.  Do you want more war?  Are you not yet weary of contest?  Will you gather up the unexploded fragments of this prodigious magazine of all mischief, and heap them up for continued explosions?  Does not the South need peace?  And, since free labor is inevitable, will you have it in its worst forms or in its best?  Shall it be ignorant, impertinent, indolent, or shall it be educated, self-respecting, moral, and self-supporting?  Will you have men as drudges, or will you have them as citizens?  Since they have vindicated the government, and cemented its foundation stones with their blood, may they not offer the tribute of their support to maintain its laws and its policy?  It is better