Sunday Dispatch

CANT AND CAN'T

It has been somewhat wittily said that the word "can't" is not to be found in the American vocabulary. Supposing that this is literally true, we are quite certain that the word cant is not only to be found in the dictionary, but that also its essence is to be found in the mouths of most men. Brotherhood is continually dinned into our ears above the roar of the cannon. Well, the murderer at the gallows-foot is our brother, and as God constituted him, and as his own race educated him, it seems the graver crime to punish him; yet his fellows do so as their only safe alternative. The rebellion was very ably and patiently planned—it came within an ace of success—it made one error and it lost the game. Give it peace, impunity and time, and there can be no surety for consequences. The first great success of the war had no sooner gilded our banner than the slippered fire-side traitors among us clamored that the moment had come for a general amnesty. No repentance had been evinced by the South; nothing but an unexpected, and to it, incomprehensible reverse, had befallen it. Justice and Peace were to kiss one another, although Peace was morally certain to use Justice's dagger before she wiped her mouth. We look at Emancipation as weak men contemplate calamities—distance enchants them and makes them sublime. Something compels other men with more resolution to go up to these same horrors and strike at them, and lo! they vanish like fog-banks and turn out to be chimera shadows vague as impalpable. Thus the question of Emancipation seems to many minds the very hollowest bugbear that ever appalled a fool. There is nothing in the Constitution to enslave a black man—nothing to prevent a white man being enslaved while such a precedent exists at the instance of demagogues. Such danger may seem impossible, but the constitution itself is expressly stated to be an instrument for a Union that is perpetual; that is its end above all others—and it has been set aside as coolly as if it was an old glove by the slave states. There is not a slave in the country that has not been bred a laboring man, and as a class there is not any body of men so well calculated to pay their way and to support their condition of freedom. Super-vision they will want—tuition they will want—but they cannot be anything like so hard to manage as the Indians have been. We have got along with them, or have got rid of them with a show of justice and of humanity, and perhaps the sooner we begin to set to work, in justice and humanity with the negro, the better for ourselves. The evil is not likely to be lessened either by can't or cant.