Progress goes forward ever, backward never.
That human intelligence has reached higher ground within the present century than it ever before attained, goes without saying.

That we have marvelously improved upon all the mechanism of government is equally true.

But whether we have improved upon the time-honored rules of dealing with rebels by extending to them general amnesty for all their sins of commission is seriously to be debated.

If we may judge of the proper treatment of treason by the example which, according to Milton, High Heaven made of Lucifer, amnesty is a failure; if we may judge by the almost absolute failure of the results of the war of the Rebellion, we may emphatically pronounce amnesty to be a noxious weed which should not be permitted to take too firm a rooting in our dealing with traitors.

Human, it may be, to err, and to forgive Divine; but for man to extend forgiveness too far is positively fatal.
Examples are not wanting to show the truthfulness of the reasoning.
There is no error which has been productive of more disaster and death than the stupid plan adopted by the Federal government in what is known as the "Reconstruction policy." This _policy_, born out of expediency and nurtured in selfishness, was, in its inception, instinct with the elements of failure and of death.