Great honor is due to those officers who remained true despite the
example of their treacherous associates; but the greatest honor and
most important fact of all is the unanimous firmness of the common
soldiers and common sailors. To the last man, so far as known, they
have successfully resisted the traitorous efforts of those whose
commands but an hour before they obeyed as absolute law. This is the
patriotic instinct of plain people. They understand without an argument
that the destroying the Government which was made by Washington means
no good to them.

Our popular Government has often been called an experiment. Two points
in it our people have already settled--the successful _establishing_ and
the successful _administering_ of it. One still remains--its successful
_maintenance_ against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It
is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly
carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the
rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have
fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal
back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to
ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson
of peace, teaching men that what they can not take by an election
neither can they take it by a war; teaching all the folly of being the
beginners of a war.

Lest there be some uneasiness in the minds of candid men as to what is
to be the course of the Government toward the Southern States _after_
the rebellion shall have been suppressed, the Executive deems it proper
to say it will be his purpose then, as ever, to be guided by the
Constitution and the laws, and that he probably will have no different