Still more important it would have been, under the theory of this essentially victorious position of the Northern people, that Northern opinion and the purposes of Americanism on this continent--the assertion and defence of freedom and of free institutions of all sorts--should have been distinctly, peremptorily, and finally impressed upon the character and future career of our own Northern nationality. While those portions of slaveholding territory which would still have remained within the Union, would have had, of course, to be treated with courtesy and consideration, if the institution of slavery were to have been permitted to survive, they should have been thoroughly made to know from the first, that slavery among us was no longer to be regarded as a perpetuity; that it was only tolerated provisionally; and that we, as a people, had no intention of permitting its renewed influence in the councils of the nation. Cut off as these States would then have been from the possibilities of carrying on an inter-State slave trade with the Southern confederacy, the institution of slavery would have lost much of its value and potency; and allied, as those States would have been, as a small minority, with a country whose territorial and institutional preponderance would have been wholly in favor of freedom, we might have anticipated that, if closely watched and incidentally aided in its decline, the institution in these adhering slaveholding States would have reached its term of existence at no very distant day; at any rate, that it would, from the first, have been neutralized for any serious bad effects which it might have otherwise impressed upon our healthy national life. It was even worth reflection at that time whether, if the whole adjustment of the future were placed at our own disposition, there would not be less danger incurred, and more promise of a prompt, healthy, and powerful development on this continent of those grand purposes of national existence which the true American people have always had in view and at heart, if this plan were to be adopted, than if, on the contrary, the whole South were either quiescently, by the subsidence of the rebellion, or forcibly, to be reinstated within the limits of the Union, the institution of slavery remaining intact. Northeastern Virginia, Southern Maryland, and portions of Kentucky, Middle Tennessee, and Middle Missouri would still have furnished pestilent centres of intense slaveholding sentiment, and would have required, perhaps, as much exercise of vigilance in preventing their undue influence as our usually sleepy habits of inattention to such causes would have authorized us to count upon.