The nations of Europe which, six years ago, were waging war against each other, have all recovered their commercial equilibrium. Southern destitution of a thousand comforts and necessities will compel a grateful recognition of Northern abundance. A vast railroad system, telegraphs, and steamers, created for the promotion of intercourse between the sections, will be actively engaged in facilitating that intercourse. The arrogance of Southern temper will be modified under the subduing knowledge that its chivalry has been soundly whipped by Northern mudsills. Opinion, both printed and spoken, will be free-for Northern colonization will pour in with schools and ploughs, educating a hitherto benighted people, and redeeming an almost ruined agriculture by placing the manufacturer side by side with the producer. This intercourse will rapidly teach the South how grossly her banished demagogues have deceived her as to the design and purpose of the North; and, though humbled by subjugation, she will discover that her prosperity is becoming greater

than ever.

But it is idle to presume that the griefs, the passions, the fierce animosities, engendered by this awful contest, will die out while this generation lives. Too many brave men have perished, too many homes have been made desolate, too many families have been broken up and beggared for that. Men whom it has impoverished will live and die poor, remembering constantly the causes of their poverty. Widows will weep over husbands, children over fathers, slain in battle. No catalogue of griefs

and horrors could be longer or blacker. These things must be identical with those which closed up the Revolution, only ten times magnified. In those Southern States where loyal men have been outraged by their neighbors, the latter will doubtless be exterminated or driven off by those whom they have persecuted. Blood for blood will be the rule with them. Here, in the North, every local traitor will be marked. Good men will shun him, honest men refuse to trust him, society will keep him at arm's length. His generation will never cease to remember that he was a traitor. The status of these is defined already. Thus history reproduces itself, and we are living witnesses of the instructive. truth.

But underlying and overshadowing these general facts, there remains the great question of American slavery. In all former contests, both foreign and domestic, slavery was passive or incidental. In this, it is confessedly supreme, the sole animating cause of rebellion, giving it impulse at the beginning and vitality during its progress. Had it been struck down at the outset, the rebellion would have been brief and far less sanguinary. There has been no pacification during sixty years of its aggressive existence-there can be none so long as it may be continued. It has the nation by the throat, and the nation must have the courage to shake it off and destroy it. I have shown how other rebellions have ended, but it is only by universal emancipation that this one ought to be crushed.

Yet even while the war was being waged, the

South was stretching forth her hands for Northern wares and merchandise. While willing to fight, she was even more anxious to trade. From the first gun at Sumter, every lying trick that treason could devise has been practised to smuggle into the South the products of Northern workshops. A perjury was regarded as commendable that secured the admission of a handful of percussion caps. No false swearing was too black to obtain an ounce of quinine. The dearth of Northern products compelled Southern women to remain at home or go abroad in meaner stuffs than are worn by paupers in a Northern almshouse. Every intercepted letter of a Southern woman called for clothing as a necessity, pins and needles as blessings, and bonnets as the greatest of mercies!

With necessities thus embracing every department of human society, it will be impossible for the South to stand aloof from the North. Agriculture, trade, and commerce, will be greater necessities with her than ever. Her people are now impoverished, and they must begin life anew. As this grasping after Northern products prevailed during the contest wherever there was hope of its being gratified, so will it become stronger and more general with peace. Trade of all descriptions will immediately revive. War has fulfilled its mission-her people. have had enough of it, and the old antagonism on the slavery question will no longer disturb what will soon become a general harmony of interests. Commerce will compel a thorough and lasting fraternization. The South will be far safer for Northern

emigrants than it has been, during three years, for natives of her soil.

The quantity of land to change owners and be settled up is almost incredible. In Virginia alone, according to Judge Underwood, there are more than two hundred million dollars' worth of property, chiefly real estate, which ought to be confiscated. Thousands of acres have already been sold to Northern purchasers. "These States," says Mr. Julian, "constitute one of the fairest portions of the globe. They are larger in area than all the free States of the North. They have a sea and gulf coast of more than six thousand miles in extent, and are drained by more than fifty navigable rivers, which are never closed to navigation by the rigor of the climate. They have at least as rich a soil as the States of the North, yielding great wealth-producing staples peculiar to them, and two or three crops in the year. They have a finer climate, and their agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial advantages, are decidedly superior. Their geographical position is better, as respects the great commercial centres of the world. The institution of slavery, which has so long cursed these regions by excluding emigration, degrading labor, and impoverishing the soil, will very soon be expelled. The cry which already comes up from these lands is for free laborers. If we offer them free homesteads, and protect their rights, they will come. John Bright, in a recent speech at Birmingham, estimates that within the past year 150,000 people have sailed from England to New York. Let it be settled that slavery is dead,

and that the estates of traitors in the South can be had under the provisions of the Homestead law, and foreign immigration will be quadrupled, if not augmented ten fold. Millions in the Old World, hungering and thirsting after the righteousness of free institutions, will flock to the sunny South, and mingle there with the swarms of our own people in the pursuit of new homes under kindlier skies. Immigration has not slackened, even during this war, and in determining the direction it will take, it must be remembered that settlements have very nearly reached their limits in the North and West. Kansas and Nebraska are border States, and must so continue. Their storms, and droughts, and desert plains, give a pretty distinct hint that the emigrant must seek his Eldorado in latitudes further South. In the new northwestern States the richest lands have been purchased, and vast portions of them locked up by speculators. Their distance from the great markets for their produce, and their severe winters, will also check emigration in that direction, and incline it further South, if lands can be procured there with tolerable facility. The rebel States not only abound in cheap and fertile land, with cheap labor in the persons of the freedmen to assist in its cultivation, but they possess great mineral resources. They have also extensive lines of railroads, which, in connection with their great rivers, bring almost every portion of their territory into communication with the sea."

With slavery extinct, and peace restored, then, in the eloquent language of Solicitor Whiting, "the