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It is alleged by reckless party orators that those who ask for guaranties before readmitting the seceded States wish to treat them with harshness, if not with cruelty. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens is triumphantly quoted, as if his foolish violence fairly represented the political opinions of the Union party. They might as well be made responsible for his notions of finance. We are quite willing to let Mr. Stevens be paired off with Mr. Vallandigham, and to believe that neither is a fair exponent of the average sentiment of his party. Calling names should be left to children, with whom, as with too large a class of our political speakers, it seems to pass for argument. We believe it never does so with the people; certainly not with the intelligent, who make a majority among them, unless (as in the case of “Copperhead”) there be one of those hardly-to-be-defined realities behind the name which they are so quick to detect. We cannot say that we have any great sympathy for the particular form of mildness which discovers either a “martyr,” or a “pure-hearted patriot,” or even a “lofty statesman,” in Mr. Jefferson Davis, the latter qualification of him having been among the discoveries of the London Times when it thought his side was going to win; but we can say that nothing has surprised us more, or seemed to us a more striking evidence of the humanizing influence of democracy, than the entire absence of any temper that could be called revengeful in the people of the North toward their late enemies. If it be a part of that inconsistent mixture of purely personal motives and more than legitimate executive action which Mr. Johnson is pleased to call his “policy,”–if it be a part of that to treat the South with all the leniency that is short of folly and all the conciliation that is short of meanness,–then we were advocates of it before Mr. Johnson. While he was yet only ruminating in his vindictive mind, sore with such rancor as none but a “plebeian,” as he used to call himself, can feel against his social superiors, the only really agrarian proclamation ever put forth by any legitimate ruler, and which was countersigned by the now suddenly “conservative” Secretary of State, we were in favor of measures that should look to governing the South by such means as the South itself afforded, or could be made to afford. It is true that, as a part of the South, we reckoned the colored people bound to us by every tie of honor, justice, and principle, but we never wished to wink out of sight the natural feelings of men suddenly deprived of what they conceived to be their property,–of men, too, whom we respected for their courage and endurance even in a bad cause. But we believed then, as we believe now, and as events have justified us in believing, that there could be no graver error than to flatter our own feebleness and uncertainty by calling it magnanimity,–a virtue which does not scorn the society of patience and prudence, but which cannot subsist apart from courage and fidelity to principle. A people so boyish and conceited as the Southerners have always shown themselves to be, unwilling ever to deal with facts, but only with their own imagination of them, would be sure to interpret indecision as cowardice, if not as an unwilling tribute to that superiority of which men who really possess it are the last to boast. They have learned nothing from the war but to hate the men who subdued them, and to misinterpret and misrepresent the causes of their subduing; and even now, when a feeling has been steadily growing in the rest of the country for the last nine months deeper and more intense than any during the war, because mixed with an angry sense of unexpected and treacherous disappointment, instead of setting their strength to the rebuilding of their shattered social fabric, they are waiting, as they waited four years ago, for a division in the North which will never come, and hailing in Andrew Johnson a scourge of God who is to avenge them in the desolation of our cities! Is it not time that these men were transplanted at least into the nineteenth century, and, if they cannot be suddenly Americanized, made to understand something of the country which was too good for them, even though at the cost of a rude shock to their childish self-conceit? Is that a properly reconstructed Union in the Southern half of which no Northern man’s life is safe except at the sacrifice of his conscience, his freedom of speech, of everything but his love of money? To our minds the providential purpose of this intervention of Mr. Johnson in our affairs is to warn us of the solemn duty that lies upon us in this single crisis of our history, when the chance is offered us of stamping our future with greatness or contempt, and which requires something like statesmanship in the people themselves, as well as in those who act for them. The South insisted upon war, and has had enough of it; it is now our turn to insist that the peace we have conquered shall be so settled as to make war impossible for the future.