It is true that this gift is vastly more than any of the Rebel States has any right to claim. When the King of Oude rebels against England, he does not find, at the end of the war, that, because he is utterly defeated, things are to go on upon their old agreeable footing. Rebellion is not, in its nature, one of those pretty plays of little children, which can stop when either party is tired, because he asks for it to stop, so gently that both parties shall walk on hand in hand till either has got breath enough to begin the game again. If the nation were contending against real and permanent enemies, in reducing to order the States of the Confederacy, or if the national feeling towards the people of those States were the bitter feeling which their leaders profess towards our people, the nation would, of course, offer no such easy terms. The nation would say, "When you threw off the Constitution, you did it for better for worse. It guarantied to you your State governments. You spurned the guaranty. Let it be so. Let the guaranty be withdrawn. You cannot sustain them. Let them go, then. You have destroyed them. And the nation governs you by proconsuls." But the nation has no such desire to deal harshly with these people. The nation knows that more than half of them were never regarded as people at home,--that they had no more to do with the Rebellion than had the oxen with which they labored. The nation knows that of the rest of the Southern people literally only a handful professed power in the State. The nation knows, therefore, that what pretended to be a union of republics was, really, to take Gouverneur Morris's phrase, a union of republics with oligarchies,--seventeen republics united to fourteen oligarchies, when this thing began. The nation knows that the fourteen will be happier, stronger, more prosperous than ever, when their people have the rights of which they are partly conscious,--when they also become republics. The nation means to carry out the constitutional guaranty, and give them the republican government which under the Constitution belongs to every State in the Union. The nation looks forward to prosperous centuries, in which these States, with these people and the descendants of these people, shall be united in one nation with the republics which have been true to the nation. For all these reasons the nation has no thought of insisting on its rights as against Rebel States. It has no thunders of vengeance except for those who have led in these iniquities. For the people who have been misled it has pardon, protection, encouragement, and hope. It can afford to be generous. And at the President's hands it makes the offer which will be received. * * * * *