Already schemes to restore the old State governments are rife, in respect to Louisiana, Mississippi, and other of the rebel States, now again brought within our military lines. Let this be done upon the old footing at an early day, for these States and for the others, which under the hypothesis now under consideration, will soon be subjugated; let the Emancipation Proclamation fall into desuetude; let the military authority of our army officers be withdrawn, and there is nothing in the character of the Southern slaveholding aristocracy, and no other power on earth, to prevent their flocking in crowds and at the very first general election back to Washington, reuniting their forces with the old body of profligate political hacks at the North, and flaunting with increased presumption and activity the pretensions of slavery to dictate the whole policy of the land. In that event, a strong party, more distinctively proslavery and Southern than ever before, will be organized; more openly and shamelessly than ever devoted to the destruction of the last remnant of American liberty. Of course there will be a new reaction against the new usurpation. The conflict will be renewed, beginning precisely where the first war began, with the only exception that the issue will be then more distinctly understood, the conflict more desperate, and the result more definitive. It is of the utmost importance that the true nature of the case be understood: that this war is no accident of the hour, no merely political or national event even. It is a death struggle between two antagonist civilizations; if indeed one of them can be called a civilization, and not rather a conspiracy against the very idea of civilization. Again, the men involved in that conspiracy are not _hidalgos_, _ancien regime_, nor any of the proud aristocracies of the old world, who, when beaten, retire upon their dignity and hide their time. They are, on the contrary, an enterprising gang of desperadoes, who for the nonce may find it convenient to play the _role_ of high life and dignified pretension, but who, on the slightest change of circumstances, are ready for any shift, any seeming degradation or humiliation, any temporary lowering of their claims, in order to rise higher on the next wave. There is also enough of the savage and barbarous element of character remaining in the Southern bogus chivalry to make them, like the Chinaman or the Japanese, incapable of appreciating magnanimity. All conciliation or clemency will be construed into weakness; generosity and forbearance into poltroonery. These are sad truths; but being truths, the failure to know them in season may cost us another and a more desperate war, with more doubtful and dangerous results.