Every good citizen most cordially desired the earliest practicable reestablishment of the constitutional relations of the late "rebel States" to the national government; but, before restoring those States to all the functions of self-government within the Union, the national government was in conscience bound to keep in mind certain debts of honor. One was due to the Union men of the South who had stood true to the republic in the days of trial and danger; and the other was due to the colored people who had furnished 200,000 soldiers to our army at the time when enlistments were running slack, and to whom we had given the solemn promise of freedom at a time when that promise gave a distinct moral character to our war for the Union, fatally discouraging the inclination of foreign governments to interfere in our civil conflict. Not only imperative reasons of statesmanship, but the very honor of the republic seemed to forbid that the fate of the emancipated slaves be turned over to State governments ruled by the former master class without the simplest possible guaranty of the genuineness of their freedom. But, as every fair-minded observer would admit, nothing could have been more certain than that the political restoration of the "late rebel States" as self-governing bodies on the North Carolina plan would, at that time, have put the whole legislative and executive power of those States into the hands of men ignorant of the ways of free labor society, who sincerely believed that the negro would not work without physical compulsion and was generally unfit for freedom, and who were then pressed by the dire necessities of their impoverished condition to force out of the negroes all the agricultural labor they could with the least possible regard for their new rights. The consequences of all this were witnessed in the actual experiences of every day. [Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL E. R. S. CANBY COMMANDER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF LOUISIANA] _Arming the Young Men of the South_