The rebels arrest, imprison, or banish those who are disaffected to their cause. They have a right to do so, provided their rebellion itself be justifiable; although they have made themselves objects of just execration and abhorrence by the abominable atrocities of cruelty and murder they have in thousands of instances perpetrated upon those whom they knew or suspected to be faithful to the Union. Your sensibilities, however, are excited only in behalf of the traitors among us, who have done more, and are doing more, to aid and comfort the public enemy, and to weaken the military power of the Government, than whole divisions of rebels in arms. While millions of good patriots stand amazed at the extraordinary and unparalleled leniency with which the Government has for the most part dealt with these traitors--that is, _done nothing_ with them--you and your associates are fierce in your denunciations of its action in the few cases in which it has temporarily arrested them; and even the requiring of them to take the oath of allegiance as a condition of release, has been made matter of bitter invective. What but disloyalty to the national cause, what but sympathy with the rebels, can prompt such denunciations--made, too, with a view to stir up popular disaffection to the Government? To sum up: I have shown that all the acts you denounce are as perfectly constitutional as they are just and necessary in principle, and sanctioned by the practice of all Governments. But even if it were otherwise; even if the framers of the Constitution--never contemplating the possibility of such a crisis as the present--had embodied in that instrument no provision of extraordinary powers for such an exigency--none the less would it be the duty and the right of Congress and of the Executive to adopt whatever measures they should judge the public safety to require. What the Constitution had not granted they would be bound, if necessary, to assume; and even if the Constitution stood in the way, they would be bound to go over it in order to save the national existence. It is one of those cases in which necessity gives sovereign right. It is doubtless a very illegal thing to blow up people's houses, yet what civic magistrate, not a fool, would hesitate to do it when nothing else could arrest the conflagration of a city; and what court of law is there (outside of _Liliput_, where poor Gulliver was condemned to death for saving the royal palace by an illegal fire engine) so foolish as to sustain an action against the magistrate in such a case? What must be thought, then, of the good sense and loyalty of those who would interpose the Constitution to prevent the suppression of a gigantic rebellion, which puts the Constitution, the Government, and the national existence in imminent peril of destruction? Who, that knows anything which a man of decent intelligence is bound to know, but knows that '_the salvation of the republic is the supreme law_?' On this principle