56 This done, do not suffer the definitive reconstruction to be protracted. I admit readily that this is the opportunity for the return of the South as well as for the ending of the negro question. This question once solved, the doois of Congress should be opened. What is done in such matters must be done with good grace, at the favorable moment; reconciliations long delayed and deferred lose their value. Bad habits are quickly contracted. This single and precious moment past, in which the return of the South would be effected spontaneously, since all are desiring and expecting it, you run the risk of not again finding the same disposition. You will grow accustomed to living apart; the distance between the North and the South will be widened; the dissensions will become envenomed ; new grievances will arise ; and you will end by having victors and vanquished, occupiers and occupied, governors and governed, almost conquerors and conquered. The re-establishment of the Union will then become difficult indeed. Ah I do not accustom yourselves to living without the South, to dispensing with the South, to ruling the South in the manner of territories, or you will, in the end, create with your own hands a separation more real than that over which you have just triumphed ; and then, at the first grave incident of your foreign policy, you will perhaps encounter real enemies on the other side of the Potomac. It may cost you something to open your arms at this moment to the South after such a conflict; you may regret that you had not taken certain guarantees or precautions ; but he who risks nothing gains nothing, and boldness is one of the characteristics of great policy. If you will risk nothing, absolutely nothing, you will not re-establish the Union, you will not succeed in living together, in working together, and even in contending together, which is' not an evil, provided that the former ground of your strife has disappeared. I spoke just now of habits. There are those of isolation, and there are those of life in common. Friendly quarrels make a part of the latter ; and it will be to your honor to have accepted, on the morrow of such a war, the difficulties,
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