Looking back, we can now see that much that was trying to the patience
of the loyal masses of the North in the early stages of the war, has
only served to make it more certain that what ought to be will be. Time
has done justice to the idiotic policy of fighting the rebellion with
one hand and with the other upholding the institution that constituted
at once its motive and its strength. Time has brought policy and justice
to shake hands together at the right moment on the same road, and made
that respectable and acceptable as a military necessity which was once
repudiated as a fanaticism. Time has brought out the President's
Emancipation Proclamation, and established it on a firm basis in the
judgment and consent of all wise and true loyal men, North and South--to
the great discomfiture of sundry politicians--the utterances of some of
whom not long ago can be no otherwise taken than as the revelation and
despairing death wail of disconcerted schemes. Strange that men whose
whole lives have been passed in forecasting public opinion for their
political uses, should have rushed upon the thick bosses of the great
shield of the public will, which begirts the President and his
Emancipation Proclamation;--for certainly all the railing at
_radicalism_, which we heard in certain quarters last summer, was in
fact nothing but the expression of disappointment and chagrin at the
emancipation policy of the President, and that too at a time when that
policy had come to be accepted by the great body of the loyal people of
the nation (including all the eminent Southern loyalists), as not only
indispensable to the national salvation, but desirable in every view.
Strange that at such a time, and among those once active and influential
in the formation of the Republican party--a party born of the roused
spirit of resistance to slavery aggressions--there should have been
found a single person unable to discern and to accept the inevitable
logic of events which was to make the extinction of slavery the only