arms four years thereafter.

The giant form of the slave-master, the tyrant, still rises superior
to law, to awe and oppress the unorganized proletariat--the common
people, the laboring class. Even when slavery was first introduced
into this country, Fate had written upon the walls of the nation that
it "must go," and go it must, as the result of wise statesmanship or
amid the smoke of battle and the awful "diapason of cannonade." No man
can tell whether wisdom will dictate further argument of peaceful, or
there must be found a violent, solution; but all men of passable
intelligence know and feel that justice will prevail. Progress goes
forward ever, backward never.

That human intelligence has reached higher ground within the present
century than it ever before attained, goes without saying. That we
have marvelously improved upon all the mechanism of government is
equally true. But whether we have improved upon the time-honored rules
of dealing with rebels by extending to them general amnesty for all
their sins of commission is seriously to be debated. If we may judge
of the proper treatment of treason by the example which, according to
Milton, High Heaven made of Lucifer, amnesty is a failure; if we may
judge by the almost absolute failure of the results of the war of the
Rebellion, we may emphatically pronounce amnesty to be a noxious weed
which should not be permitted to take too firm a rooting in our
dealing with traitors. Human, it may be, to err, and to forgive
Divine; but for man to extend forgiveness too far is positively fatal.
Examples are not wanting to show the truthfulness of the reasoning.

There is no error which has been productive of more disaster and death
than the stupid plan adopted by the Federal government in what is