it

"What!"

that, where definite acts of crime can be brought home and proved upon the doers of them, they ought to be dealt with sternly, impartially, with the rigid and even justice which marks the true course of public law. But for retaliation, retribution, any thing that attempts to apportion the penalty to the guilt, and that on so wide a scale and over so vast a territory, is impossible to entertain a serious thought of it. some say, "shall all those monstrous crimes go unpunished? Shall we have no satisfaction for the war which was brought on us wantonly and unprepared? Shall we have no compensation for the tides of blood that have been spilt? Shall the lives of our sons and brothers, slain in this most wanton of rebellions, go unavenged? Shall not this vast calamity which has overtaken our nation and race be visited upon the heads of those who, with their eyes open, brought it upon us?" In one sense, it is even so. We are not commissioned to measure out or to punish the degrees of personal guilt in the authors of all this misery. Still less are we commissioned to be the agents of any feeling, however natural or even just, of retaliation and revenge.

We do not speak of that technical retaliation, in a military sense, where the life of a prisoner of war, for example, is threatened, in order to prevent cruelty and outrage on the other side. Here, there is no thought of punishment, no accusation of guilt, no thirst for vengeance. It is an awful last resort, one so dreadful in its nature, that, in every instance we can call to mind, our Government has shrunk from carrying out its threat, and preferred the humiliation of seeming to break its word, and forsake its helpless men, rather than exact the penalty of their wrongs, in the lives of captive enemies. We have no judgment to pass here on that awful last resort of the law of arms, when the innocent are deliberately made to suffer for the guilty. But there is another sort of retaliation, which is nothing else but mischievous and wrong. Wherever our armies in the South felt free to "punish" (as they called it) the guilt of treason, of which they felt those people to be guilty, in the burning of houses, the destruction of estates, the plundering or insulting of the people, or any sort of personal cruelty upon them, in any sort of vio

lence or destruction not strictly enjoined by the law of military service, or strictly required to supply the wants of our own armies, or to weaken the military force opposed to them,then it was a crime; and the evil consequences of it are sure to be brought to bear upon the conscience and welfare of our people. To some feeble degree we are atoning for it, by feeding the multitudes who were left to starve, and by clothing the multitudes who were stripped to perish. But the great atonement of that wrong must be worked out through years, perhaps generations, of suspicion, ill-will, secret hate, and brooding treachery; also, through the crippled industry, the diminished welfare, the more difficult administration, of the domain won back blasted to the nation's rule and care. Every such thought of retaliation, every such notion of the punishment of guilt by unlawful modes and unauthorized hands, was a mistake in the beginning, a dreadful and disastrous mistake, whose immediate act was crime, and whose late result must be for evil.

And this is a distinction which it is important to make very clear in our own minds, much more clear than it seems very to have been in many of the discussions we have heard upon the subject. The war, let us understand, is a thing of the past. Whatever the guilt of it in its origin, it has been visited in the most awful manner upon the whole section of country, and upon every class of men who have taken part in it. Nothing can be added on our part to that vengeance with which divine justice has repaid, with even curious, almost (we might say) statistical completeness, each item of wrath that had been laid up against the day of wrath. The day when the public safety might seem to call for or justify measures of retaliation, has passed by with the war itself,let us hope, never to return. It is time for us, now at least, to look upon this whole matter of crime and its penalty, calmly and dispassionately; to look at it only as it bears on the future safety, welfare, honor, and the truest moral interest, of our nation.

Those criminals who were executed in Washington the other day, for instance, whatever emotion of wrath or vengeance their crime had roused, had entirely passed away, with

most of us, in the course of their long trial, in the light thrown upon the circumstances of their lives, and the unravelling of their wretched plot, in the spectacle of their friends' distress, and in the human pity that is awakened by the near presence of a helpless human creature, bound, and waiting its doom. All wrath and vengeance were laid aside. Even, we might say, there was more likelihood of a sentimental compassion, a morbid tenderness, towards them; so that of the millions that loudly demanded their lives in April, very few would have signed their death-warrant without compunction in July. But among these few was that stern, inflexible man, of severe feature, of unbending will, and with a life's experience very hardly tried, who was, as it were, the divinely commissioned minister of doom, to expiate his predecessor's murder. Swiftly the stroke fell. One day only intervened. The country was spared the scandal, and the criminals the pain, of those wretched months that so often intervene between the sentence and its execution. All was over, and the heart of the nation says, It is well.

What has been so strikingly illustrated here, we ought to have in mind in that whole course of criminal justice which now lies before our Government, in dealing with the authors and upholders of the rebellion. A great and in some respects a heavy and dreadful task! But one which will be very much lightened, not merely to the doers of it, but to the heart of our people at large, who must sustain their agents in it, if we keep in mind the safe and only rule of public justice: Absolutely nothing for retaliation and vengeance; little, if any thing, of the pretence to weigh out and apportion the measure of personal responsibility; every thing in view simply of the general good, the future peace and honor of the nation. In the course of the war, there were other feelings which inevitably came up, and it seemed as if they must be satisfied, could the nation only get the power. Now the nation has got the power; but the question of using it shows itself in quite another light. The controlling motive now must be, not merely to secure the advantage, safety, and satisfaction of that part of the nation which remained loyal when attacked, but to bring back to harmony, prosperity, and peace, a vast population and an

enormous territory long alienated and distressed by war. There have been many crimes in the course of it, of peculiar atrocity, the burning of houses; the hanging of men for loyalty; the plunder, outrage, and dispersion of their families; the shooting and starving of prisoners; the series of desperate plots by which the later fortunes of the war were sought to be retrieved. There will be work enough to deal with the doers and accomplices of these, and inflict on them just sentence according to the best established principles of law.

But at heart we have felt as if there were one crime which lay behind them all, and embraced them all; and this we have called the crime of treason. How can we deal with it, now that the day of its great madness is over, and that its power is gone out in ashes and blood? Still we say, there is but one safe rule, the peace and security of the State. If that requires, in a given instance, a man's exile or imprisonment, or the confiscation of his goods, or the forfeiture of his life even, so let the law decide, yet without emotion of wrath, or thought of vengeance, to enforce its verdict. It is not for us to measure the degrees of guilt, or to mete out the amount of retribution. These men, for all we know, were like other men, - no better, and probably not much worse, than the average of men. Let us put ourselves in their situation, and we shall not find it hard to see how we might be led, we will not say to share in their crime, or to approve of it, but to accept it as one of the dreadful necessities of the state of things they had brought about. As to the first act itself, which we call treason, that is, armed resistance against the Govern ment, they first persuaded themselves there was no wrong in that. They had carefully trained themselves to a theory of government which assumed the right of one State to renounce the authority of the rest. No such apparent harm in that, perhaps, as we look at it in theory: at any rate, it was a doctrine which twelve years ago was getting rather popular among some classes of us here at the North, who longed to see New England free of the restraint and odium of laws passed in defence of slavery. Follow out their theory, and New England, a dozen years ago, might have been a sea of fire

VOL. LXXIX.-5TH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. II.

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and blood. They were kept in check by the average loyal common sense of the North. At the South there was no such check. Personal pride, recklessness of moral restraint, the habit of despotic authority, feudal temper cherished by feudal institutions, State rights, and local jealousies,—all worked together to make it easy and plain, to turn the plausible theory of secession into the awful and dangerous experiment of secession. And, having once chosen their path, it was harder and harder to quit it.

can.

It is not necessary to think they were criminals, and guilty above all other men; that is to say, guilty in their own eyes, acting against their own sense of right, criminal in the sense in which a thief or murderer knows that he is guilty. That they were bred in a system of slavery, corrupt and effete, was surely their misfortune, and not their fault; and, granting this, all the rest follows, almost of its own accord. Most likely they did not expect a very severe struggle, a very bloody war, to establish their supremacy. At any rate, their supremacy they were determined to establish, cost what it would. Every man would rather secure his ends at a cheap rate, than a costly one; at a cheap rate of guilt and suffering, if he can; with as little wear and tear of conscience as he The war at any rate the great scale of it, and the terrible necessities it brought with it - was no doubt a dreadful and a sickening surprise to most of those who brought it on. Some of them were no doubt prepared for it, and perfectly ready and reckless to plunge the country into it. Some thought the mere show of violence would be enough to bring the Government to terms of surrender,- at least, to terms of peaceable bargaining and compromise. Some proposed to get off cheaply, with one or two acts of murder at starting, and offered great rewards to any who would prevent the inaugur ation of a Northern president. Some hoped one thing, some another. But what strikes us in their language at the time is, that everybody hoped, and nobody feared. On our side, we remember how different it was. Everybody feared, and few hoped. There, all was hopeful, sunny, proud, complacent, selfconfident. They had embarked on the fatal stream. Little