Chiefly and most unwisely is the conservative hand shown at present in opposition to every proposition for confiscation or punishing the rebels.  After having hurried us by their cowardice and Southern toad-eating into this war; after urging it by their contemptible procrastination to its present tremendous proportions, they cry out ‘humanity!’ for the men who have murdered our relatives, and shake the Constitution for protection over estates which have been directly used to contribute to Southern war!  While every mail from the South gives fresh instances of desperation, and while we search in vain for a trace of proof that there is the slightest hope of reconciliation, we are still entreated to restore every thing in statu quo ante bellum, and bear all the results of the war ourselves, as if forsooth we had been after all in the wrong.  And so the Vallandighams and Davises declare that we were.  ‘Abolitionism caused it all,’ they say, ’nothing but Abolition.’

Meanwhile, the question urges itself on us every day with more pressing power, how we are really to settle the whole difficulty?  We see but one course—­the ‘Northing’ of the South.  We are content to waive for the present all theory or project of confiscation, save so far as promoting the settlement of those soldiers and emigrants who may wish to settle in the South is concerned. This question demands consideration, and must have it.  Whether the lands to be appropriated for this purpose come from rebel estates which have ministered to the war, or whether they are to be taken from State property, they must be had; for the settlement of the South and the proper rewarding of the army are matters of paramount importance.  The South can no longer exist in its present social condition.  People who believe, to use the language of their most respectable journal, the Richmond Whig, that: 

’Yankees are the most contemptible and detestable of God’s creation; vile wretches, whose daily sustenance consists in the refuse of all other people; for they eat nothing that any body else will buy;... who have long very properly looked upon themselves as our social inferiors, as our serfs:’ 

People, we say, who believe this of us, must be taught to think differently and truthfully.  If they lived in China, it would be otherwise; but linked to us as they are, we can no longer tolerate such outrageous superciliousness as they manifest.  Those among them who will learn, may be taught; those who will not, must be supplanted by people who are not too proud to work, who do not ’abominate the system of free schools, because the schools are free,’[B] and revile free labor, because it consists of ’greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, and small-fisted farmers.’  The task is great; but it must be accomplished.  The war is drawing to an end; but a greater and nobler task lies before the soldiers and the free men of America—­the extending of civilization into the South.