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hearts stop to catch the last whisper of its echoes. The poor slave has heard it, and with bounding joy, tempered by the mystery of religion, he worships and adores. The waiting Continent has heard it, and already foresees the fulfilled prophecy, when she will sit "redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by the irresistible Genius of Universal Emancipation."

J. A. Andrew,

I

CCLXXVIII.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CONTEST.

HOLD this armed contest to be a great historical movement, and to have high moral interest and significance, because it is to determine the character of the institutions under which we and those who come after us, are to live. You are not merely sustaining the administration of President Lincoln against unlawful combinations, but you are fighting on the side of law, order. government, civilization and progress. The result of this war is to settle the question whether they who are hereafter to inhabit this magnificent country are or are not to have that primal blessing of a good government, without which the most abundant material resources are as valueless as scientific books or philosophical instruments would be among the most barbarous tribes of Africa or Australia. Surely there cannot be imagined a war more worthy of calling forth all the energies of a great people than this.

And if I am asked to define my meaning more distinctly anc precisely, I say that the questions now submitted to the sterr arbitrament of war are substantially these: Is the Constitution of the United States a compact or a law? Is this Union a Commonwealth, a State, or is it merely a confederacy or a copartner ship? Is there a right of secession in the separate States, singly or collectively, other than the right of revolution? These are momentous questions, and if they can be settled in no other way than by war, then such a war is worth the price it costs, grea as that is For if the right of secession be fairly and logically deducible from the Constitution if any State, upon its own mere motion, with cause or without cause, can withdraw from the Union as a partner may dissolve a copartnership then th

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Constitution itself is a stupendous failure, the men who made it were bungling journeymen and not master-mechanics, and the institutions of our country, so far from deserving our gratitude and admiration, are worthy only of our contempt. The hour has come, and the men have come, to settle these issues, fraught with such vital consequences to unborn millions. The dusky clouds, surcharged with electric fires, that stand front to front in mid air, and darken the heavens with their power, have been long in gathering; let the storm continue till the air is cleared — and no longer.

I want to have it now determined that for all future time any State, or any cluster of States, that may attempt to coerce or bully a legal and constitutional majority by the threat of secession, shall be met with the answer: "You don't go out of this Union unless you are strong enough to fight your way out." I want to have the armed heel of the country crush the serpent head of secession, now and forever, so that it shall never again glare with its baleful eyes, or brandish its venomous tongue. Let not the fate and fortunes of this glorious country be committed to the keeping of a clumsy, misshapen raft, compacted of twenty-four or thirty-four logs, good enough to float down a river, but sure to go to pieces when it gets into deep water; but let them be embarked on board a goodly ship, well found, well fastened, well manned — in which every timber and plank has been so fashioned as to contribute to the beauty and strength of the whole fabric, with a good seaman at the helm, the Constitution in the binnacle, and the stars and stripes at the masthead When the time of my departure shall come, let me feel, let me know, that I leave those whom I love under the protection of a government good enough to secure the affection of its subjects, and strong enough to enforce their obedience. Remember that of a strong government be sometimes bad, a weak government s never good.

G. S. Hillard.

WE

CCLXXIX.

THE MILITARY CAPACITY OF THE people.

E have cause for gratitude in the military capacity which our people have developed. We had no great standing

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armies. We had but a single thoroughly furnished military school. There was no military profession proper, inviting young men on the threshold of life to choose the trade of arms. soldier's garb was a rare spectacle, and every child ran to the window to gaze at the passing glitter. Whence should come our fighting men if the bugle should blow? You must have men before you have soldiers. Our institutions raised men. Proverbially the Yankee can turn his hand to anything. He likes to do well what he undertakes. He has a pride in showing himself equal to his position. Above all, he has force of personal character. When a Northern regiment makes a charge, it is not merely the weight of so much physical humanity; there goes weight of character with it. Why, there is an accomplished schoolmaster there, and the best blacksmith of the village, and a solid merchant, and a dexterous lawyer, and the handiest coachman of the stable, and a well known stage-driver on a prominent public route, and a butcher with an unerring cleaver, and a jolly tar whose vessel never missed stays with his hand at the wheel; do you suppose that these men are going to charge like so many nameless Hessians? Why, it is a personal matter with every one of them. They go in under orders, to be sure, but they have not lost the sense of individual responsibility. The thing is to be well done because they are there. I know it, my friends, the personal character of our recruits lends weight and irresistibleness to them as soldiers.

There have been no braver men, no stouter soldiers, in all war's red annals, than these armed clerks, farmers, college boys, and their comrades of every peaceful calling. Each community keeps the name of some young hero, nobler than Spartan mothers ever welcomed on his shield. Redder blood never stained the earth, than those full libations our new mustered ranks have poured out for union, law, and liberty. There has been no fighting in the bloody past of human story, where muzzle to muzzle and steel to steel, bold hearts have more truly played the man, than in those battles of two years past in which our citizen armies have saved our nationality. Never have the hardships of the camp, the march, the field, and the trenches, and the merciless privations of imprisonment been more heroically endured. It was not needed — and our President said it well—to conse

crate the sacred acres of Gettysburg; that was already done by the deep baptism that had laved those hills, and not that field only, but all the sands and sods and waves our boys' brave blood have crimsoned. No land beneath the blue heavens was ever kept by stouter living bulwarks; no mourners ever had a nobler heritage than those that mourn our soldier-dead.

A. L. Stone.

Go

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CCLXXX.

LIMIT TO HUMAN DOMINION.

OD has given the land to man, but the sea He has reserved to Himself. "The sea is His, and He made it." He has given man no inheritance in it; no, not so much as to set his foot on." If he enters its domain, he enters it as a pilgrim and a stranger. He may pass over it, but he can have no abiding place upon it. He cannot build his house, nor so much as pitch his tent within it. He cannot mark it with his lines, nor subdue it to his uses, nor rear his monuments upon it. It steadfastly refuses to own him as its lord and master. Its depths do not tremble at his coming. Its waters do not flee when he appeareth. All the strength of all his generations is to it as a feather before the whirlwind; and all the noise of his commerce, and all the thunder of his navies, it can hush in a moment within the silence of its impenetrable abysses. Whole armies have gone down into that unfathomable darkness, and not a floating bubble marks the place of their disappearing. If all the populations of the world, from the beginning of time, were cast into its depths, the smooth surface of its oblivion would close over them in an hour; and if all the cities of the earth, and all the structures and monuments ever reared by man, were heaped together over that grave for a tombstone, it would not break the surface of the deep, or lift back their memory to the light of the sun and the breath of the upper air. The sea would roll its billows in derision, a thousand fathoms deep, above the topmost stone of that mighty sepulchre. The patient earth submits to the rule of man, and the mountains bow their rocky heads before the hammer of his power and the blast of his terrible enginery. The

sea cares not for him; not so much as a single hair's breadth can its level be lowered or lifted by all the art, and all the effort, and all the enginery of all the generations of time. He comes and goes upon it, and a moment after it is as if he had never been there. He may engrave his titles upon the mountain top, and quarry his signature into the foundations of the globe, but he cannot write his name on the sea. And thus, by its material uses and its spiritual voices, does the sea ever speak to us, to tell us that its builder and maker is God. He hewed its channels in the deep, and drew its barriers upon the sand, and cast its belted waters around the world. He fitted it to the earth and the sky, and poised them skilfully, the one against the other, when He "measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance." He gave the sea its wonderful laws, and armed it with its wonderful powers, and set it upon its wonderful work.

"O'er all its breadth His wisdom walks,
On all its waves His goodness shines."

L. Swain.

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CCLXXXI.

THE BATTLE OF CIVILIZATIONS.

UR war is only an appeal from the nineteenth century of freedom and ballots to the system of the sixteenth century The old conflict, a new weapon, that is all. The South thought because once, twice, thrice, the spaniel North had gotten down on her knees, that this time, also, poisoned by cotton-dust, she would kiss her feet. But instead of that, for the first time in our history, the North has flung the insult back, and said: "By the Almighty, the Mississippi is mine, and I will have it." Now, when shall come peace? Out of this warlike conflict, when shall come peace? Just as it came in the conflict of parties and discussion. Whenever one civilization gets the uppermost positively, then there will be peace, and never till then. There is no new thing under the sun. our future is the light of experience.

The light shed upon Seventy years have not

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