We wish it were as easy to restore General McClellan's army to what it was before the Peninsular campaign as he seems to think it is to put the country back where it was at the beginning of the war. The war, it is true, was undertaken to assert the sovereignty of the Constitution, but the true cause of quarrel was, not that the South denied the supremacy of that instrument, but that they claimed the sole right to interpret it, and to interpret it in a sense hostile to the true ideal of the country, and the clear interests of the people. But circumstances have changed, and what was at first a struggle to maintain the outward form of our government has become a contest to preserve the life and assert the supreme will of the nation. Even in April, 1861, underneath that desire for legal sanction common to our race, which expressed itself in loyalty to the Constitution, there was an instinctive feeling that the very germinating principle of our nationality was at stake, and that unity of territory was but another name for unity of idea; nay, was impossible without it, and undesirable if it were possible. It was not against the Constitution that the Rebels declared war, but against free institutions; and if they are beaten, they must submit to the triumph of those institutions. Their only chance of constitutional victory was at the polls. They rejected it, though it was in their grasp, and now it is for us, and not them, to dictate terms. After all the priceless blood they have shed, General McClellan would say to them, "Come back and rule us." Mr. Lincoln says, "Come back as equals, with every avenue of power open to you that is open to us; but the advantage which the slaveholding interest wrung from the weakness of the fathers your own madness has forfeited to the sons."