hope of a growing enfranchisement of the nations in the future.

In such a contest, who can doubt that it is our duty to go forward, waging it to the end? Not without meaning was it, we may be sure, that its first martyrs were the sons of Massachusetts, and that they fell on the anniversary of the blood that opened the Revolution at Concord and Lexington. The coincidence is the providential intimation of the identity of the conflict; we will accept it also as a prophecy of the result. The conflict, indeed, is as old as the race. It dates from the first protest of right against night, and of man against tyranny and aristocracy. It is the same conflict that Moses waged in Egypt,-that the Gracchi waged in Rome,-that Cromwell and Sidney and Hampden waged in England, and that has been waged wherever a word has been spoken, or a blow has been struck for the overthrow of irresponsible power. Our fathers entered on other men's labors, and took up this conflict where the heroes and martyrs of the English Revolution had left it. As one chapter in its history, they appealed to the sword and vindicated the claim of a people to be represented in any government by which they are taxed. Ours it is to take the same sword and write another chapter, finishing what they began by vindicating human equality, the authority of law, and the ability of a democratic government to maintain itself alike against enemies without and traitors within. Our fathers promulgated principles; we are to establish them.

We have already, perhaps, sufficiently intimated our opinion as to the relations of this subject to the question of Christian duty. The spirit of Christianity is peaceful, but it is not craven, nor does it ask us to be traitors to humanity, or, by inaction, accomplices to the destruction of liberty and the overthrow of government, as the price of obedience to its requirements. It condemns the spirit that makes war; but it has only approval for those who stand for the assailed right, and defend, though it must be by the sword and at the cost of life, the majesty of law and the sacred interests of freedom and justice. "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men," is the Apostle's exhortation; and planting ourselves on this as the common-sense as well as the Apostolic interpretation of the Sermon on the

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Mount, and the succeeding lessons of the New Testament, we claim that our position in this conflict is one that Christ approves and that God will bless. Christianity, as well as every sentiment of a genuine manhood, would rebuke us for poltroonery and an inexcusable disloyalty to the most solemn trusts, if we should suffer any theories of non-resistance, or any scruples about the lawfulness of war, or any rose-colored sentimentalisms about the beauty and desirableness of peace, to weaken our arms, or lessen our zeal in this resistance to traitors and this rally for liberty and law. No wonder that Quakers, and peace-men lay aside their scruples, and pour out their money, or gird themselves for this warfare. No wonder that the Peace Society, at its recent meeting, not only did not condemn, but at least indirectly approved it. And well does the Advocate of Peace, in its late issue, say:

"The cause of Peace was never meant to meet such a crisis as is now upon us. It belongs not to Peace, but to Government alone; and all that can be required of us, is that we prove ourselves loyal citizens. It is not strictly war, but a legitimate effort by government for the enforcement of its laws, and the maintenance of its proper and indispensable authority. The principle is the same with that which quells a riot in one of our cities, or seizes an assassin or incendiary, and brings him to condign punishment. . . . It becomes every peace-man to throw his entire influence against the gigantic crime of attempting to overthrow the freest and best government on earth, in order to establish upon its ruins an oligarchy of slaveholders for the extension of slavery over a continent. If a million of men were mustered to put down by force this climax of all offences, it would still be in form, as it ought ever to be in spirit, only a simple, rightful enforcement of the laws-the very laws which the rebels themselves helped enact against a combined, wholesale violation of them."

We endorse these sentiments; nor, in doing so, can we refrain from adding that, though never an opponent of strictly defensive war, we have found occasion, amidst the lessons of events, to reconsider some of our theories in connection with this general subject. We have not heretofore believed in the maxim, "In peace, prepare for war." We have groaned at the expenditures for our army and navy. We have opposed military companies and "trainings.' have thought all these things a needless waste of time and

We

money; have had no faith in the efficiency of such "holiday soldiers," and have turned from them with a kind of disgust, especially when we have seen ministers, as we have thought, dishonoring their office by countenancing them as chaplains. All this is changed now. We have lost none of our faith in the importance or desirableness of peace, or in the principles upon which what is called "the cause of Peace" is founded. Our horror of war and our sense of its wrong and evils are no whit abated. But we have seen to what risks our Capital and our country have been exposed because our ships and our arms and our soldiers had been so traitorously scattered; we have been made to realize that rebellion would, in all probability, be flaunting its flag over Washington to-day, in possession of the archives, and possibly of the prestige, of the government, had it not been for "the N. Y. 7th" and "the Mass. 8th;" and we have made up our mind that, so long as there are violent and evil men in the world, government must be ready to check and restrain them, and that it can do so only by strengthening its arm of military defence. In one view, it may seem a poor use that men make of themselves when they train themselves in the art of destruction, and we may find reason to ask whether we are fulfilling the highest ends of life when we go forth to meet our brothers in mortal conflict; but there is another view in which we see that whoever puts himself on the side of right against wrong, and counts life not dear to himself for the sake of great principles and precious interests imperilled, is doing a great and noble thing, whatever he may do. Action is noble or base according to the spirit that fills it; and if we can sing the hymn

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"Nothing so small can be,

But draws, when acted for Thy sake,
Greatness and worth from Thee;
When done beneath Thy laws,

Even servile labors shine-
Hallowed is toil, if this the cause,
The meanest work divine,"-

not less can we see dignity even in the poorest military training," and feel that we are answering the highest ends of life when we draw the sword against the lawless and the violent, if but a spirit of loyalty to God and duty nerve our arms and inspire our hearts.

We have said that we shall suffer much on account of this war; but it will also do us good. We needed its discipline and its awakening power. We needed its revival of patriotism, and its occasions for heroism and self-sacrifice. Partyism needed to be broken up. We needed to be lifted out of our mammonism and selfishness; to be taught the unity of our sympathies and interests; and to be recalled to the recognition and service of the grand first principles of our republic. This war has done and is doing all this. It is, in important respects, a moral regeneration ;-an emancipation of our politics from the thraldom of the slavepower;-a fresh baptism of the whole North into sympathy with liberty. Already, we are breathing deeper, and have been kindled into a worthier sense of our American responsibility. The heart of the people has been quickened to a healthier beat. Never before, during the quarter of a century that we have taken note of our affairs, have we seen so much to assure us of the moral and political vitality of the nation. The government has been tested, and was never before so strong as it is to-day, because it never before so well knew its strength, or its resources in the love and loyalty of the people, deeper than all love of party,—higher than all love of ease, or gain, or home. There are tories and traitors among us, indeed, as there will be among every people struggling for the right, but by no approach so many in proportion as in the Revolution. There will be peculation and jobbing; men who will cheat in contracts, and scruple not to coin money out of the sufferings of soldiers and the sale of their own souls. But the masses are true, and will learn new lessons of hope and confidence as they are taught their unity in a common love of country, and will gather heroism out of the sacrifices they will make, or from their sympathy with noble deeds. A grand sight it has been to see the spirit that has thus been evoked, the enthusiasm and unselfishness of patriotism that have thus been inspired,— the old fires of revolutionary ardor and chivalry that have thus been re-kindled,-the sublime loyalty to our traditions that in the hour of peril, in spite of all our differences, binds us together as one man. A grand sight it has been to see with what alacrity the call of the country has been responded to-how the farmer has left his plough, and the mechanic his shop, and the merchant his counter, and the professional

man his office, and the petted sons of wealth their ease and their luxuries, to go forth-many of them, no doubt, in a mere love of adventure, but the most of them to fight the battles of our endangered institutions; and how mothers, wives and daughters have freely given up their loved— sometimes their all, saying, Go, stand bravely in your place, and come back to us, if you come, with honor unstained; to see men fresh from the strife of a hotly contested election, forgetting party names and jealousies and prejudices, and rallying shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart, to hold up the flag that traitors would pull down, and to support the government that rebellion would overthrow ;-to see men who have been accustomed to count trade the great interest, and to make their gains their first thought, coming forward and pouring out their money like water-from mercenary motives, some of them, without doubt, but the great mass of them in a generous zeal for the service of their country and for the maintenance of its credit and its power.

Many persons had come to doubt whether there were any of the spirit of the olden time surviving among us, and to think that love of country had been lost in love for party, and the willingness to sacrifice for principles swallowed up in a devotion to trade. The old stuff of our patriotism, it was fashionable to say, had been consumed, and our manhood had become "choked with cotton, or cankered with gold." Thank God all this has been effectually disproved. We shall have no more talk about modern degeneracy. The children are showing themselves no whit behind their fathers. The first gun fired into the starving garrison of Sumpter was the roll-call of the nation, in response to which the people are showing that there are to-day patriots as true, -heroes and heroines as noble,-citizens as self-sacrificing as have ever illumined our history with their deeds, or sanctified our soil with their blood. And though there is much for us to suffer in consequence of the strife, we shall come out of it nobler, more vigorous, more vital, more united, because more conscious of our own loyalty; with less allegiance to party and more allegiance to ideas; with a clearer conception of principles, and a profounder sense of the worth of our republic and of our obligations to it. The shock is severe, but the result will be not only to settle our government more firmly on its foundations and to give us and