When the time comes for amnesty and ‘Southern Rights,’ we trust that they will be considered in a spirit of justice and mercy.  Till it comes let there be no word spoken of them.  The South has, to its own detriment and to ours, firmly and faithfully believed that Northern men are cowards, misers, men sneaking through life in all dishonor and baseness.  When millions believe such intolerable falsehoods of other millions of their fellow-citizens, they must be taught the truth, no matter what the lesson costs.  Even now the Southern press asserts that our victories were merely the results of overwhelming majorities, and that the Yankees are becoming frightened at their own successes.  There is not one of these traitorous, dough-face meetings of which the details are not promptly sent—­probably by the men who organize them—­all over the South to inspire faith in a falling cause.  When the rebels shall have learned that these traitors have positively no influence here,—­and the sooner they learn it the better,—­when they realize that the people of the North are as determined as themselves, and their equals in all noble qualities, then, and not till then, will it be time to talk of those concessions which now strike every one as smacking of meanness and cowardice.

The day has come for a new order of things.  The South must learn—­and show by its acts that it has been convinced—­that the North is its equal in those virtues which it claims to monopolize.  But this it will only learn from the young and vigorous minds of the new school,—­from its enemies,—­and not from the trembling old-fashioned traitors, who have been so long at its feet that they shiver and are bewildered, now that they are fairly isolated, by the tide of war, from their former ruler.  Politicians of this stamp, who have grown old while prating of Southern rights, can not, do not, and never will realize but that, some day or other, all will be restored in statu quo ante bellum.  They expect Union victories, but somehow believe that their old king will enjoy his own again—­that there will be a morning when the South will rule as before.  It is this which inspires their craven timidity.  They cry out against emancipation in every form,—­blind to the onward and inevitable changes which are going on,—­so that when the South comes in again they may point to their record and say, ’We were ever true to you.  We, indeed, urged the war, for we were compelled by you to fight, but we were always true to your main principles.’  They have wasted time and trouble sadly—­it will all be of no avail.  Be it by the war, be it by what means it may, the social system and political rule of the South are irrevocably doomed.  It may, from time to time, have its convulsive recoveries, but it is doomed.  The demands of free labor for a wider area will make themselves felt, and the black will give way to the white, as in the West the buffalo vanishes before the bee.