We would not be understood to mean that Congress should lay down in advance a fixed rule not to be departed from to suit the circumstances of special cases as they arise. What may do very well for Tennessee may not be as good for South Carolina. Wise statesmanship does not so much consist in the agreement of its forms with any abstract ideal, however perfect, as in its adaptation to the wants of the governed and its capacity of shaping itself to the demands of the time. It is not to be judged by its intention, but by its results, and those will be proportioned to its practical, and not its theoretic, excellence. The Anglo-Saxon soundness of understanding has shown itself in nothing more clearly than in allowing institutions to be formulated gradually by custom, convenience, or necessity, and in preferring the practical comfort of a system that works, to the French method of a scientific machinery of perpetual motion, demonstrably perfect in all its parts, and yet refusing to go. We do not wish to see scientific treatment, however admirable, applied to the details of reconstruction, if that is to be, as now seems probable, the next problem that is to try our intelligence and firmness. But there are certain points, it seems to us, on which it is important that public opinion should come to some sort of understanding in advance. The peace negotiations have been of service in demonstrating that it is not any ill blood engendered by war, any diversity of interests properly national, any supposed antagonism of race, but simply the slaveholding class, that now stands between us and peace, as four years ago it forced us into war. Precisely as the principle of Divine right could make no lasting truce with the French Revolution, the Satanic right of the stronger to enslave the weaker can come to no understanding with democracy. The conflict is in the things, not in the men, and one or the other must abdicate. Of course the leaders, to whom submission would be ruin, and a few sincere believers in the doctrine of State rights, are willing to sacrifice even slavery for independence, a word which has a double meaning for some of them; but there can be no doubt that an offer to receive the seceding States back to their old position under the Constitution would have put the war party in a hopeless minority at the South. We think there are manifest symptoms that the chinks made by the four years' struggle have let in new light to the Southern people, however it may be with their ruling faction, and that they begin to suspect a diversity of interest between themselves, who chiefly suffer by the war, and the small class who bullied them into it for selfish purposes of their own. However that may be, the late proposal of Davis and Lee for the arming of slaves, though they certainly did not so intend it, has removed a very serious obstacle from our path. It is true that the emancipating clause was struck out of the act as finally passed by the shadowy Congress at