others are not claimed by any country. With permanent peace their vocation ends. They feebly and despairingly unite their voices with the disappointed revolutionists of the North in their protests against the peace of 1877.
The people of the North who approve and support this final adjustment are those who recognize and obey the authority of the Constitution. They trust no man with their liberties who, in legislation, in administration, in policy or in judgment, in peace or in war, goes outside the Constitution to find the sources of his civil power or the sanctions of his conduct in public affairs.
Such men feel the pulsations of fraternal regard that beat in honest hearts in all sections of the country, and are not restrained by lines of latitude in expressing their cordial response. They do not despise the weak nor worship the powerful. They do not believe that the moral worth of five millions of Americans has been settled against their pretensions to virtuous and patriotic love of country, and against their light to be esteemed as worthy of respect and confidence, by the fact that they fought four years and did not resist successfully thirty millions of Americans. They do not believe that only those are worthy of trust who belonged to the victorious power.
With supporters like these, the country need not fear that peace and reconciliation will not abide in the land.
I turn now to those in the South who support this great work, and I will endeavor to establish the proposition that they will abide by it with fidelity, and maintain it with honor and zeal.
I know that distrust is ready to meet us at the door of many an honest heart; that passion and prejudice are not yet extinguished or removed from every mind; that differences of opinion yet exist amongst us, the discussion of which recalls the bitterness and intolerance of former strife.
We feel that this distrust is not deserved by the people of the South, because they acted with good conscience and without any criminal intent or purpose in their great controversy with the North.
If we have now met in peace and reconciliation upon the broad concessions, mutually accepted, that the war was not a crime, we need not inquire who was right or who was wrong. Nor need we concern ourselves whether the one side or the other retains the bitter memories of the war with the greater tenacity. Controversies between States are not capable of being adjusted by reference solely to the temper of mind which may influence even a majority of the people.
Peace would never follow any war if it could only be established after the people had forgotten or had ceased to cherish their bitter animosities.
