They that die for a good cause are redeemed from death. Their names are gathered and garnered. Their memory is precious. Each place grows proud for them who were born there. There is to be, ere long, in every village and in every neighborhood, a glowing pride in its martyred heroes. Tablets shall preserve their names. Pious love shall renew their inscriptions as time and the unfeeling elements decay them. And the national festivals shall give multitudes of precious names to the orator's lips. Children shall grow up under more sacred inspirations whose elder brothers, dying nobly for their country, left a name that honored and inspired all who bore it. Orphan children shall find thousands of fathers and mothers to love and help those whom dying heroes left as a legacy to the gratitude of the public. Oh, tell me not that they are dead-that generous host, that airy army of invisible heroes! They hover as a cloud of witnesses above this nation. Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society, and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism? Ye that mourn, let gladness mingle with your tears. He was your son; but now he is the nation's. He made your household bright; now his example inspires a thousand households. Dear to his brothers and sisters, he is now brother to every generous youth in the land. Before, he was narrowed, appropriated, shut up to you. Now he is augmented, set free, and given to all. He has died from the family, that he might live to the nation. Not one name shall be forgotten or neglected; and it shall by-and-by be confessed, as of an ancient hero, that he did more for his country by his death than by his whole life. Neither are they less honored who shall bear through life the marks of wounds and sufferings. Neither epaulette nor badge is so honorable as wounds received in a good cause. Many a man shall envy him who henceforth limps. So strange is the transforming power of patriotic ardor, that men shall almost covet disfigurement. Crowds will give way to hobbling cripples, and uncover in the presence of feebleness and helplessness. And buoyant children shall pause in their noisy games, and with loving reverence honor them whose hands can work no more, and whose feet are no longer able to march except upon that journey which brings good men to honor and immortality. Oh, mother of lost children! set not in darkness nor sorrow whom a nation honors. Oh, mourners of the early dead! they shall live again, and live forever. Your sorrows are our gladness. The nation lives, because you gave it men that loved it better than their own lives. And when a few more days shall have cleared the perils from around the nation's brow, and she shall sit in unsullied garments of liberty, with justice upon her forehead, love in her eyes, and truth upon her lips, she shall not forget those whose blood gave vital currents to her heart, and whose life, given to her, shall live with her life till time shall be no more. Every mountain and hill shall have its treasured name, every river shall keep some solemn title, every valley and every lake shall cherish its honored register; and till the mountains are worn out, and the rivers forget to flow, till the clouds are weary of replenishing springs, and the springs forget to gush, and the rills to sing, shall their names be kept fresh with reverent honors which are inscribed upon the book of National Remembrance! Henry Ward Beecher, 1863. CONDUCT OF THE COLORED PEOPLE. LET us not forget those that cannot remember themselves, or make sign in our midst. I desire to express in the presence of God's people, and before Almighty God, my profound gratitude for that eminent and evident interposition of divine providence which has been manifested in the good conduct of the people of African descent among us. I thank God for that wonderful wisdom which they that are yet enchained and within the lines of bondage have manifested. It was in their power to have done themselves and us much mischief, by giving way to intemperate desires or feelings. They have been held as in the hollow of God's hand. Nor can any remember in any newspaper, or in any man's mouth, one word of complaint, for three years, to have been uttered against-one word of fault to have been found with the great mass of millions of men that have heard the war for liberty thundering within their reach, and yet have maintained quiet, patiently waiting for the revelation of God's mercy toward them. I thank God for the endurance, for the patience, for the conscientious good conduct of those men whom it has been our wont to hear represented as monsters who only wanted a chance to carry riot and rapine and devastation through the world. There never has been a people so many and so tempted that behaved so well as the slaves of the South. And they that have become freedmen— how have they helped us! I mean not by shovel and spade, though they have helped us much by these. I mean not by their labor, but by manifesting the truth which we have witnessed, and which we have believed in-though it has been much disputed,-that a man brought suddenly out of slavery into liberty is not dangerous-that it is safe to emancipate. There are some men that are still, by force of old legendary lore, talking about the dangers of emancipation. Around from the delta of the Mississippi, for fifteen hundred miles, till you touch the coast of North Carolina, there has been one wide belt of emancipation; and point me to a mischief or an irregularity arising from it. I bring the testimony of our officers, Southern born and Northern, that the colored people are behaving worthy of their liberty. is safe to emancipate. It I thank God that while we were striving for the right of manhood in colored men, He by His providence, that is so much wiser than the wisdom of the wisest, has led them to demonstrate what we are trying to prove-and to demonstrate it so as to meet just that apprehension which needs to be met. The colored soldiers that have been regimented and taken to the field, by their courage, by their docility, by their good conduct in the most fiery trials, have shown that they were men. I am sorry that so large a part of human society yet lives so low that the capacity of a man to show the courage of an animal is the best test that he is a man; but so it is! There is nothing that will make the common people so sympathize with the black man as to know that he fights well. He does fight well, and he is a man because he fights well! War is not thought to be a civilizer, yet men may have been held so low that even war is elevation-and so it has been with the colored people. They go up a great way before they have a right to touch the sword; and when they have taken their lives in their hands, and, with enthusiasm inspiring their hearts, have hewn their way on the rocky path to manhood; when this war has ceased, and a hundred thousand colored men can show wounds received in heroic service, or give other evidence that they have bravely fought for our country, I will put these men before the nation, and say, "They have given their blood to your blood; will you let them or their kind be trampled under foot any more ?" Henry Ward Beecher, 1863. THE STRENGTH OF THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT. THE enemies of popular right and power have been pointing to the dreadful proof which is afforded in America, that an extended suffrage is a thing to be shunned as the most calamitous thing possible to a country. I will not refer to the speeches that have dealt with this question in this manner, or to the newspapers which have so treated it. I believe now that a great many people in this country are beginning to see that those who have been misleading them for the last two or three years have been profoundly dishonest or profoundly ignorant. If I am to give my opinion upon it, I should say that that which has taken place in America within the last three years affords the most triumphant answer to charges of this kind. Let us see the Government of the United States. I might say a good deal in favor of it in the South even, but we will speak of the free States. In the North they have a suffrage which is almost what here would be called a manhood suffrage. There are frequent elections, vote by ballot, and ten thousand, twenty thousand, and one hundred thousand persons vote at an election. Will anybody deny that the Government at Washington, as regards its own people, is the strongest Government in the world at this hour? And for this simple reason: because it is based on the will, and the good will, of an instructed people. Look at its power! I am not now discussing why it is, or the cause which is developing this power; but power is the thing which men regard in these old countries, and which they ascribe mainly to European institutions; but look at the power which the United States have developed! They have brought more men into the field, they have built more ships for their navy, they have shown greater resources than any nation in Europe at this moment is capable of. Look at the order which has prevailed at their elections, at which, as you see by the papers, fifty thousand, or one hundred thousand, or two hundred and fifty thousand persons voting in a given State, with less disorder than you have seen lately in three of the smallest boroughs in England. Look at their industry. Notwithstanding this terrific struggle, their agriculture, their manufactures and commerce proceed with an uninterrupted success. They are ruled by a President, chosen, it is true, not from some worn-out royal or noble blood, but from the people, and the one whose truthfulness and spotless honor have claimed him universal praise; and now the country that has been vilified through half the organs of the press in Eng land during the last three years, and was pointed out, too, as an example to be shunned by many of your statesmen-that country, now in mortal strife, affords a haven and a home for multitudes flying from the burdens and the neglect of the old governments of Europe; and, when this mortal strife is over when peace is restored, when slavery is destroyed, when the Union is cemented afresh-for I would say, in the language of one of our own poets addressing his country, "The grave's not dug where traitor hands shall lay, then Europe and England may learn that an instructed democracy is the surest foundation of government, and that education and freedom are the only sources of true greatness and true happiness among any people. John Bright, of England, 1863. THE CAUSE OF THE UNION SURE TO SUCCEED. I TELL you candidly that if it were not for one cause, I should regard as hopeless and useless the attempt to subjugate the Southern States. It is the object and purpose with which the war was begun, that in my opinion renders success to the secessionists impossible. We were told in the House of Commons, by one who was once the great champion of democracy, and of the rights and privileges of the unsophisticated millions, that this civil war was originated because the South wished to establish free trade principles, and that the North would not allow it. I travelled in the United States in 1859, the year before the fatal shot was fired at Fort Sumter, which has had such terrible reverberations ever since. I visited Washington during the session of Congress. Now I carry a flag; and wherever I go, whenever I travel abroad, whether it be in France or America, Austria or Russia, I at once become the centre of all those who have strong convictions and purposes in reference to free trade principles. Well, I confess to you, what I confessed to my friends when I returned, that I was disappointed when at Washington in 1859, because there was so little interest felt on the free trade question. There was no party formed, no public agitation; there was no discussion whatever upon the subject of free trade and protection. The political field was wholly occupied by one question, and that question was slavery. I will mention an illustrative fact which I have not seen cited; to my mind |