There is no land on earth where treason may work with such impunity as in our own. And this is owing as well to the greater latitude conceded to political speculations by the very nature of our system, as to the fact that our ancestors, having, as they thought, effectually destroyed all those incentives to treason which exist in more despotic lands, and little anticipating the new motives which might with changing men and times spring up in our midst, neglected to ordain the preventives and remedies for a disease which they imagined could never flourish in our healthy atmosphere. And while they imposed an inadequate penalty, they at the same time made so difficult the proof of this the greatest of crimes, that when at last the monster reared its head and stalked boldly through the land, there was no power to check or destroy it. It will be ours to see, in the future, that this impunity is taken away from this worse than parricide, and that, while a more awful penalty is affixed to the crime, the plotter shall be as amenable to the law and as easy to be convicted as he who takes the murderous weapon in his hands. And for the accomplishment of this and similar ends, doubtless greater power will be conceded by the States to the Federal Government. The day has gone by when the people were frightened at the bare idea of giving to the central Government the necessary power to maintain its own integrity. The pernicious doctrine of State sovereignty as paramount to the national, has in this war received its deathblow at the hands of those who have always been its most zealous supporters. The South, starting out upon the very basis of this greatest political heresy of our age, had no sooner taken the initiatory step in severing completely all the ties and bonds which held them to the Union, than they discarded the very doctrine which had been their strongest weapon in forcing their people to revolt: well knowing that no government founded upon such a basis could stand for a single year; that the upholding of such a principle was neither more nor less than political suicide. And though at the commencement of our struggle there were many at the North in whose minds the dogma had taken deep root, few are found to-day to uphold the pernicious doctrine, and those few men of more than questionable loyalty. And not this principle only, but every other which is inconsistent with republican ideas, antagonistic to the growth of the giant plant of human freedom, has come to its death at the hands of the god of war. Great commotions are the test of great ideas, and that principle either of government or of human action which can withstand the shock of such an upheaving as the present, and come unharmed through the war of such conflicting elements, may well claim our support as founded in eternal truth. The penetrating glance of human intellect, sharpened by the perilous exigencies of the times, and by the quick