us? _Do we want all this work to do over again_ every ten or five years
or all the time? For a quarter of a century, slavery and nothing else
has kept us in a growing fever, and now that it has reached a crisis the
question is whether we shall calm down the patient with cool rose-water.
In the crisis comes a physician who knows the constitution of his
patient, and proposes searching remedies and a thorough cure,--and, lo!
the old nurse cries out that he is interfering and acting unwisely,
though he is quite as willing to adopt her cooling present solace as
she.

If we had walked over the war-course last spring without opposition,--if
we had conquered the South, would we have put an end to this trouble?
Does any one believe that we would? This is not now a question of the
right to hold slaves, or the wrong of so doing. All of that old
abolition jargon went out and died with the present aspect of the war.
So far as nine-tenths of the North ever cared, or do now care, slaves
might have hoed away down in Dixie, until supplanted, as they have been
in the North, by the irrepressible advance of manufactures and small
farms, or by free labor. 'Keep your slaves and hold your tongues,' was,
and would be now, our utterance. But they would not hold their tongues.
It was 'rule or ruin' with them. And if, as it seems, a man can not hold
slaves without being arrogant and unjust to others, we must take his
slaves away.

And why is not this the proper time to urge emancipation? Divested of
all deceitful and evasive turns, the question reduces itself to
this,--are we to definitely conquer the enemy once and for all, the
great enemy Oligarchy, by taking out its very heart? or are we to keep
up this strife with slaveholders forever? It is a great and hard thing
to do, this crushing the difficulty, but we must either do it or be done