But it is sometimes asserted that the small minority of citizens in the Rebel States claiming to be, and to have been, loyal, constitute the States in the constitutional meaning of the term. Now without insisting on the fact that it is so plainly impossible to accurately distinguish these from the disloyal, that an oath, not required by State constitutions, has, in the recent attempt at reconstruction, been imposed by Federal authority on all voters alike, it is plain that no minority in a political society can claim exemption from political evils it had not power to prevent. Had we gone to war with Great Britain, the property of Cobden and Bright on the high seas would have been as liable to capture as that of Lindsay or Laird. No loyal citizens at the South could have been more bitterly opposed to Secession than some of our Northern Copperheads were to the war for the Union; and yet the persons of the Copperheads were as liable to conscription, and their property to taxation, as those of the most enthusiastic Republicans. There would be an end to political societies, if men should refuse to be held responsible for all public acts except those they personally approved. A member of a community whose people, in a convention, broke faith with the United States, and made war against it, the Southern Unionist was forced into complicity with the crime. By the pressure of a power he could not resist he was compelled to pay Confederate taxes, serve in Confederate armies, and become a portion of the Confederate strength. More than this: the property in human beings, which he held by local law, was confiscated by the Federal government's edict of emancipation, equally with the same kind of property held by the most disloyal. And now that the war is over, he and those who sympathized with him are not the State, which was extinguished by its own act when it rebelled. He and his friends may be the objects of sympathy, of honor, of reward; but in the work of reconstruction the interest and safety of the great body of loyal citizens of the United States, of the persons who have bought the territory at such a terrible price, are to be primarily consulted. And not simply because such a course is expedient, but because the Southern Unionists can advance no valid claim to be the political societies which were recognized by the Federal constitution as States before the Rebellion. If they were, they might proceed at once to assume the powers of the States, without any authority from Washington, and without calling any convention to form a _new_ constitution. If, on the breaking out of the Rebellion, they had rallied in defence of the old constitutions within State limits, preserved the organization of the States in all departments, raised and equipped armies, and conducted a war against the Confederates as traitors to their respective States as well as to the United States, they might present some claims to be