contest, but the contending masses have not. While we thought it confined to our own harbors and rivers and gulfs, God has made it a tidal wave for the world, to set all the nations forward. While we made the battle as between North and South, God made it as between the old and the new, the earth over. It is one of those starts, steps onward, impetuses, that the nations get once in a while among the centuries, creating a general progressive movement all round.

We have made a pressure on chattel slavery, on oligarchy as dominating over the masses, on ignorance as cultivated and patronized by local governments, on monopoly of wealth as grinding the poor; and in the pressure we have succeeded in taking a step forward. We have taken it not for our people alone, but for all those peoples who are performing unrequited labor, and obeying laws they did not make, and groping in an ignorance they can feel only to yield to. So have we helped all needy populations to move forward a little, as when in a press and throng one step forward by those at the front is the signal and the opportunity for all to make a gain.

Somebody

On these grand issues between two conflicting civilizations we have waged a stupendous war. It has been the old form of contract and the old price for civil rights: the shedding and paying of human blood. It is all very well to theorize about peace, and to preach peace, and as much as lieth in us to live. peaceably with all men. Blessed are the peace makers. But it must needs be that offenses come. All the upward steps of civil and social right are marked with human blood. died for the gain. There is no single item in the British Constitution, or our own Bill of Rights, no great civil principle in our statutes, but men fought to secure it. The right of jury trial, of habeas corpus, of making your house your castle against all illegal entrance, of standing on your personal defense to the death, though the humblest man in the realm, and a thousand other rights as common and necessary and unnoticed by us as the air of heaven, each and all, could they tell their origin and growth to maturity and safety, would tell of spearmen, and archers, and mail clad cavalry; of matchlocks and broadswords, cannon and Sharpe's rifles. All our civil rights have had a most uncivil and bloody beginning. And it is a

singular fact that rarely a generation goes through life without seeing its government at war, renewing the bloody seal of its rights. It has been thought that our struggle might have been prevented. With the goodness of angels and the patience of God, perhaps so; but with our thirty millions of flesh and blood men, probably not. Moreover, there are some ideas that nothing but a battle field can clear up, and some others that nothing but a battle field can explode. Very like if a few scores of men had died thirty years ago, the war might have been postponed, perhaps indefinitely. But they lived, and to see half a million die.

The war itself was on a most stupendous scale. If we include all the men and munitions of war employed, the area of land and water covered, the time consumed, the number and character of the battles and the number of men who fell, we find no parallel to it in history. Europe has hardly room to manœuvre such armies, and can boast of few such battle fields. We shudder to think what, a work of devastation and death we followed up for more than four years. Our excitement and intense determination at the time made us in a measure unconscious of what we were doing, and now as we look back we can hardly credit the reality. We fail to concede at first that those bloody fields and sieges and forts and marches,

that are so to fill history, were really our own. Those prisons are as something we read of in the days of Herod, and those hospitals, and Christian and Sanitary Commissions belong to the age and literature of romance. But all this, and for so long a time, was ours. We wake up to the assurance that this is no dream. It is all a startling reality. We have had such a war, the like to which in magnitude no nation ever had before. We thank God most devoutly that it is ended.

When we reflect what vast interests were involved, we shudder to think how near at times we came to making a failure. Our form of government, as democratic, was on trial for the world. The continuance of the Union not only involved the continuance of our present government, but of any harmonious governments on our territory for long and painful years. Our failure would have left the American States a prey and a plundering ground to foreign nations. The civilization of the Western

continent would have received a mournful check for a century, aud the hard governments, the low social order, the stagnation of the masses, and the intolerance of the aristocracies of Europe would have been forced on us.

Contemplating such results from the failure of the national arms, we appreciate our imminent, though at the time unknown peril, when, in the affair of the Trent, the English Cabinet were on the very point of recognizing the independence of the Confederacy, and of making demands for satisfaction in that affair by a heavy fleet at the capes of the Chesapeake. The French Emperor was more than ready to coöperate with his nation's traditional enemy in thus humbling and ruining an old and fast and powerful friend. But one quiet, energetic, persevering man in the English Cabinet was too much for Palmerston and Napoleon; and their gigantic crime of taking the life of a nation failed. To their persetual regret they failed to recognize the independence of the Confederacy at the only time when they could have had any remote, pretext for doing it, or hope of dismembering us by doing it. But for one man, the right man at the right time in the right place, by the hand of providence, we should have had foreign war added to the rebellion for perhaps twenty five years, and in the end a crippled and wasted if not broken and ruined government and Union. This was the only real danger to our success. could give but one answer as to the end of the struggle. There were minor crises connected with single battles, campaigns and policies, but all these concerned only the lengthening or shortening of the war. They did not make the end doubtful.

Let alone, we

Considering what issues were thrown into the war, we have no right to be surprised at its duration; nor has it exceeded prudent and unimpassioned forecastings that were made after the first blood was shed.

The results of the war are cause for gratitude to the God of armies beyond our most earnest anticipations. The integrity of our national territory has been preserved. No one can estimate the worth of that fact. Always it has been above price, though disloyal men have sometimes tried to weigh its worth in their small balances.

The idea of our nationality has been developed and vindica

ted. The notion that we were so many separate, sovereign states, with a power of repulsion stronger than the power of attraction, with an independence superior, and if deemed best, hostile to federal relations, has been a notion vitiating to national citizenship and dishonorable and injurious in our international relations. The independency of the state in some things, with fealty to the nation in others, has never been well understood. The war has declared some points, if it has not expounded the Constitution and early national legislation; and though much yet remains in doubt, we rest in comfort in this result at least, that no state may of its own choice and motion go out of the Union. We have decreed, if not discovered, that the door of entrance into the Union is as a valve, opening but one way.

As the war grew out of a conflict of civilizations, it was natural and necessary that slavery, an institution of the dark past, should be put in danger. Being in the way it was removed, as war allows no obstacles, and civilizations no insuperable difficulties. It has been abolished, as a mountain is tunnelled that lies in the way of a projected railway. No result of the war lies up so on the surface, conspicuous and all engrossing. It is a marked incident in this great national and international movement of the Anglo-American race. In the step forward that we have taken, as a leading nation, it was inevitable that chattel slavery should be left behind. It does not allow of progress; it can not keep pace with the ages; it belongs to the past, to the times of a feeble Christianity, to an imperfect system of morals, a sluggish philanthropy, and to an inactive, ignorant condition of civil and social life. In a result so eminently moral in its essential features it would seem highly desirable for all parties concerned, that moral causes should work it. But as the civil, so often the moral forces retire before the military, and that is achieved by force which conscience, equity and divine truth should have done long before. In such case the moral work must follow, that should have preceded and produced the act.

With but faint conception of their new position, or of the magnitude of the new boon of liberty, four millions of freedmen yet know and feel enough to swell loud the anthem of

praise to God. And philanthropic, Christian hearts all through the land will exult and give thanks exceedingly that another relic of uncivilized and unchristian times has passed by, and will no longer be known in connection with our government, except as a grief and a blot in our history.

The war has also made a grateful revelation to us of our resources for defence. A great and prosperous people, minding our own business, we had not thought much of armies and navies. We inclined more to patronize Peace Societies. The world, therefore, was surprised, and ourselves probably as much as the most, that in so short a time we put two and a half millions of men in the field with all the material of war. Suspending somewhat other pursuits, and making war the main work for the time being, all our interior became as by enchantment a camp, and our borders a line of fortifications. We had no lack of men, able officers and valiant soldiers, and a navy that gave new lessons to the world in maratime warfare. We could feed, clothe, drill, transport, and take into action, forces that would have seemed fabulous to Napoleon even. Yet all the while our commerce whitened the seas, our shops, farms and factories returned the rewards of honest toil, while the arts of a cultivated life and the pursuits of peace hardly showed a ripple in their usual and even current. In all this we discovered that we could turn aside to a new and painful and necessary work, without checking the great flow of our national life. We have also discovered that our great armies, when no longer needed, can be quietly and speedily disbanded, and the men returned to private life. This sometimes has been a greater difficulty than to raise an army. Such a power is not always willing to be dissolved; and ambitious generals and demagogues are sometimes reluctant that it should be. It requires no small amount of intelligence and virtue and patriotism in a people to be a formidable army one day and private citizens the next.

Another important result of the war is the impression we have made on foreign nations. They had known our numbers, a little of our geography and resources, with but poor understanding of the nature of our government, and a strong conviction that in time of trouble our federal bond would be very slight over the States. The sudden appearance of so large armies