How came it to pass? That is what will perplex the future historian, and amaze other generations, to understand how the people of the North, a majority of whom are neither Abolitionists nor thieves, could devote their blood and treasure to the support of a war for Abolition and plunder. For, by the time the historian deals with this bloody business, all men will see and confess that when the motives of Abolition and plunder are substracted from the war, there is nothing left. This will be plain enough; but how came the people to lend their reason to the support of such monstrous crimes? That will be the question over which the mind of the historian will stumble and flounder. To seek for an explanation of the brutalizing absurdity in the patriotism of the people, will only lead the enquirer further from the point of truth, and embarrass his path with endless mazes of contradiction. It was not reason, nor patriotism, but passion and a fondness for excitement and novelty, that beguiled the people into the support of a war from which every virtuous instinct of their hearts recoiled. The besetting weakness of the northern people of the United

States is a love of novelty and excite ment, and a proneness to run after wonders. Within ten years we have had six or seven popular excitements which, each in its turn, entirely eclipsed the wildest moment of the war furore. 1. There came the Jenny Lind excitement, when the whole people were made crazy by the tricks of an adroit showman, to see and hear a singing woman, who, with confessed merits, was inferior as an artiste and as an accom plished lady, to some who preceded, and to many who have followed her. Such was the popular madness that many went two thousand miles to see her. her. Men that could poorly afford the price of an ordinary ticket to the opera, paid ten, and twenty, and thirty dollars to hear her. Others paid a thousand dollars for a favorite seat. Octogenarians and unmusical fossils, (ame from the frigid land of Maine to New York, at ruinous expense, to hear five or six songs, when they knew not the difference between a soprano and a ontralto voice, and perhaps could not tell Old Hundred from Yankee Doo lle. The whole land seemed to be possessed of a musical devil. And yet it was not love of music; it was not appre

ciation of art that lay at the bottom of all this madness-it was love of excitement, and the charm of novelty. Those who are not ashamed of the whole thing have long been laughing at the follies of that hour. The goddess of their idolatry is fallen from the high pedestal of air on which they enthroned her, and, were she to return, she would not meet with a reception fairly due to her merits.

2. The Kossuth flood deluged the land. The victim of Russio-Austrian despotism of Russian inhumanity and butchery-found not an asylum, but a home; not a welcome, but an adoration. The demonstrations in his behalf were more like the confused and noisy ebullitions of bedlam, than the rational welcome of a great nation to an orator, a man of genius, and the representative of a wronged but gallant people. Every body, of both sexes, ran over each other, wildly rushing to lay their offerings at his feet. Capitalists and paupers vied with each other in exchanging their gold for stock in his new air-kingdom, which was to be built, by permission of the gods, on the solid foundations of the smoke that arose from the ashes of an extinguished nation. Dared any man doubt the success of the project, he was instantly knocked down, as a first instalment on the punishment due to his infidelity. Fair women boasted that they had received a kiss from the great Hungarian, and men bragged, in bar-rooms, that their wives had been kissed by his Secretary. Since the world began the like was never scen. But the philosopher would have searched in vain under all this froth and bubble for anything resembling a genuine abhorrence of Russio-Austrian barbar

ism, or a rational sympathy with the slaughtered rights of a crushed and bleeding nation. It was all due to the same characteristic passion for novelty and fondness for excitement, which had just before driven the people wild after a singing-woman.

3. Next came the Atlantic cable furore-a grand, self-glorifying jubilee, over a project that lay cold and still in the bowels of the ocean, a gigantic failure, even while we were glorifying about it. No matter for that. The success or non-success was not the underlying fountain of popular inspiration. An opportunity to demonstrate, a chance for jubilees and grand processions-that was the source of the mighty avalanche of men and women that poured through the streets and alleys of all our towns and cities. Little had we to boast of the cable, even had it proved a success. Our share in its construction was ridiculously small. The project originated in England. Nearly all the capital was furnished by England. All the work was done by English machinery and English hands; and when the cable was laid, it began and ended on English territory. But, with characteristic adroitness, we took all the glory and jubileed over it. Not that we are ambitious for glory, but that we are always ready for a jubilee, without very nice discrimination as to the propriety or impropriety, the right or wrong of the thing. The cable gave us our good time, our feasts and parades, and what care we that it lies there alone in the depths of the sea, covered with cockles, the monument of nothing but an exploded admiration! 4. After this came the Japanese excitement, when all our men, and wo

men, too, ran mad after a Japanese Tommy. Twelve or fourteen shrunk specimens of humanity, the represnta tives of uncivilization in government, and of heathenism in religion, with faces more like devils than men, were worshipped like gods for the time, and run after by all the wealth and fashion and beauty of the land. Tommy, it was said, received a basket full of loveletters a day from the fair daughters of America. Everything was Japanese. A stranger who did not understand this thing, who did not know that there was no real meaning in all this madness, would have concluded that the American people were about to throw away their civilization, religion, and manners, for those of Japan. It was all over in thirty days. The very instant the papers ceased to fan the flames, the Japan fire went out, and let nothing but its smoke to remind us of our indecent follies.

5. Right upon the heel of this national Japanese fandango, came the Prince of Wales, when, behold, our women forgot Tommy; our men ceased to worship the pigtails, and, like so many geese chasing a bug, all ran after a boy, because he was the eldest son of the Queen of England, and heirapparent to the throne. They ran after him as they had after Jenny Lind, Kossuth, the cable, Tommy, and, twenty years before, after Fanny Elsler, a dancing woman. The demonstrations in honor of the Prince of Wales were no more to be taken as expressions in favor of the principle of government he represented, or of respect for the person of the boy, than the reception of the Japanese was to be looked upon as an endorsement, by the American people, of the civilization and customs

of Japan. There was no endorsement of anything-no meaning in all these popular commotions, beyond the momentary gratification of a natural passion for novelty and excitement.

6. Came the war furore, the most senscles and reckless of all the delu sions which preceded it. Patriotism had no more to do with it than it had with the madness about Tommy or Jenny Lind. The war excitement was manufactured in the same way that al the other popular madnesses had been. It was gotten up by advertisements, play-cards, hand-bills, immense posters, transparencies, bands of music, and all the tricks usually resorted to in politi cal campaigns. All the demagogues in the country, of all parties, rushed into it with the basest motives-somefor money, some for office, some for the emancipation of negroes, but the great mass of the people were in it from no motive whatever, but from passion, novelty and excitement. They were within the circle of the all devouring whirlpool that swept on, gathering everything to its abyssmal centre. They were committed to the war without meaning it, without knowing it; certainly without endorsing a single object for which it was really commenced. With them it was a jolly lark in the beginning, a grand military spree of thirty days. Had they believed the few who told them what it was all about, not one in five thousand would have gone into it for thirty min utes. Certainly, eight out of ten would sooner have joined an army to hang all the Abolitionists than to free the negroes. The Administration knew this, and cunningly kept its real purpose in the background for months, while it placarded all the walls with a

red and yellow patriotism, and plied vigorously all the varied machinery of tricks for keeping up the popular excitement. At first men were asked to go merely to defend their capitol. The capitol-in-danger trick was played, and successfully, at least a dozen times. Indeed, the three first great armies were obtained under the cry "the capitol is in danger!" And so the capitol was in danger, but not from Jeff. Davis-for, at that time, it is certain that he never entertained a thought of scizing it but from the Abolition cabal which has, for the present, fastened on the ruins of a free government the most foolish, impudent, and abominable despotism that exists in any civilized country on the face of the earth. Had Mr. Lincoln begun his war with the Proclamation of Emancipation, he could not have raised an army sufficient for a respectable provost-guard for the city of Washington. So anxious were they to keep the idea that the war was for the negroes, out of the mind of the people, that men were threatened with assassination in New York and other cities, for saying that the Proclamation of Emancipation would come as soon as the public sense should be sufficiently demoralized to bear it. Men were sent to bastiles for publicly declaring that the war was not for the restoration of the Union. What do we hear now? Vice-President Hamlin tells the people that those who plead for "the restoration of the Union as it was are demagogues;" that the idea of "restoring the Union under the Constitution as it is, is nonsense, and bad nonsense at that." The same thing was said by the leaders of the Republican party, on the floor of gress, more than a year ago; but they

did not say it until they believed they had sufficiently demoralized and demonized the public mind to safely announce their negro-freeing and revolutionizing programme, nor until they had weeded out of the army all such Conservative, and honestly disposed Generals as McClellan, Fitz John Porter and Buel. During all this time the people were played upon by the same arts and tricks that showmen use to excite the public. Handbills, posters, public meetings, bands of music, kept up such a show and din, and excitement, that the masses had not one moment's rest from the perpetual call upon their imaginations and passions. Every device was invented to keep them from reflecting upon the objects and probable results of the war. most appalling stories, the most horri ble lics, of "southern barbarity," were invented, and published in a hundred newspapers, which were degraded tc mere organs of the most profligate sensation and disgusting falschood. The brutal acts of the Abolitionists were published as the deeds of Southerners, and an army of correspondents, of such wretches as will blaspheme for bread, kept busy at the vile work of manufa turing instances of southern cruelty. Such were and are the appliances relied upon to get up and keep on the war for Abolition and disunion.

The

But all this was not sufficient. The Democratic party was in the way, and such a war could neither be started nor carried on until the principles of that party were somehow suppressed, and its organization demoralized. How could this be done? That party had stood, from the time of Jefferson to the election of Mr. Lincoln, upon one platform touching the rights of the States,

and the limitations of the powers of the General Government. It seemed too much to expect that a party which had grown up with the Republic, and become identified with every step of its progress, should eat itself up in an hour, or turn its back upon the professions and principles of a life-time, and join its enemies, for the purpose of destroying the very foundations of selfgovernment, which were the soul and life of the Revolution, and constitute the pillars on which the whole edifice of American liberty rests. It seemed too much; but it must be accomplished, or the war could not go on. Douglas had just died. There was one leader who could neither be intimidated nor bribed, well out of the way. That is what Mr. Forney meant in his late speech at Gettysburg, when he said he "believed that Douglas died at the right time." For Abolitionism he did, but for his country, alas! at the wrong time. For, had Douglas lived, we should never have seen the desolation, despotism and blood, we now witness. One Democratic leader of the power of Senator Douglas, could have saved his country, by preventing the great Democratic party from lapsing into a mere ally of Abolitionism. But Douglas dead, the first step of the Administration was to see how many of the supposed Democratic leaders could be bought up or bought off by office, by contracts, or whatever else appealed to the selfishness and wickedness of man, and the rest it proposed to silence by intimidation. This trick so well succeeded that, thus far, the Democratic masses, who have never been for the war, have not been rallied to the polls except as disgusted allies of Abolitionism and its war. New

Jersey and Connecticut are the only exception. In New Jersey the Democracy has been perfectly triumphant, as it was also in Connecticut, though there it was defrauded of its victory by the votes of 5,000 Federal soldiers, picked out and sent home pledged to vote against it. The Democratic party cannot succeed, ought not to succeed, and we pray God it never may succeed as an ally of the Abolition party and of its war for disunion Whenever it throws its banners boldly out, in square, defiant opposition to every principle, deed and measure of the Administration, and when it abandons its cowardly policy of silence and submission, the days of redemption and victory will return, and with them the salvation of our country. The Abolitionists have carried their bloody cause entirely by shouting, placarding, and demonstrating; the only way to meet them is by counter-shouting, placarding, and demonstrating. If they fill the air with the noise of a thousand devils, let us drown it with the shouts of ten thousand freemen. That will do the business for them. They who make the most noise will be sure of the crowd. This is the sole secret of their success. We have all the clements of popular thunder, whenever we get the pluck and manhood to use them. Humanity is on our side. Law, Constitution and liberty are with us. The history and legends of the country are in our hands. We have all the means for demonstrating them into defeat and eternal disgrace, whenever, disregarding the councils of cowardly or suborned leaders, we pitch in after the real ancient style of campaigning. The State of New York was certainly lost at the late fall election, by