CONTENTS. PAGE XIII.-The Mission of the Masonic Fraternity in this War...... XIV. The Real Dignity of Citizenship-Robert J. Walker..... XV.-The United States Sanitary Commission-How it XXII.-The Immolation and Redemption of the African Race.. 160 XXIII.-Office-Holders as they are, and how they should be...... 169 XXVI.-Kind Words to Africano-Americans.................. XXVII.-African Troops-The Future Armies of the Republic... 198 XXVIII.-The Convalescent Camp of the Fourth Ohio............... 208 XXXIII.-Border-State Men and Border-State Loyalty...... XXXIV. The Commissariat of the Army. XXXV.-A Summer Morning's Ride to the Country-Seat of the Old Patriot and Poet, Joel Barlow.-A Hospital....... 239 XXXVI.—The Law of Empire in the Western Hemisphere.......... 246 THE Light and Dark of the Rebellion. I What Kind of a War This is. THE first shot into Fort Sumter was the signal-gun of the greatest and the strangest war ever waged on earth. That shot was thrown to the feet of Liberty in defiance. It was intended to inaugurate a life-or-death-struggle between Slavery and Freedom. It did its work; and the cannon which threw it will live longer in history than the torch of the wretch who burned the Ephesian Temple. Again, and on a higher stage, the struggle was to come, to test the vital forces of Civilization and Barbarism,—of Progress and Retrogression,-of Order and Anarchy, of Life. or Death, for men and communities, for society and governments. Above all was it a final grapple between the Past whose dead had buried its own dead, and the Future which was to give life to all. Something like this had been witnessed during the many thousand years of deadly strife the human race had been going through, in approaching Liberty as the road to God,--the shrine where all nations are yet to worship. The records of human defeats, sufferings, and triumphs, show little more than the heroism of the true and the good in resisting the false and the bad. 7 It seems to be the will of Heaven that nations must work out their own salvation as nations. The final Court of Appeals, to which even the uneducated conscience points its indexing finger, will judge the individual, not the community. When nations pass away, they never return. We e survey their wrecks stranded on the shore of time, merely to read some commentaries on their history,—their rise and development, their decline and fall. But civilization, which means progression towards the just, the great, the safe and sublime, was the law God instituted for society. Great thoughts never die. They go among the eternal archives of human hope and security, to which the treasures of successive ages are committed. In the literature and arts of the ancients, we have most of the finest thoughts of the finest minds,-the chief records of the noblest deeds of the noblest men. And thus the torch of light is safely transmitted from age to age. All its effulgence was shed over us from the hour our country was born. We have inherited all the earth could give us, with the fairest and broadest field for its use and development. The Creator had looked on us benignantly, as our fathers sailed for a new home beyond the sea, to find a resting-place for earth's children. Thus high did Heaven seem to fix its purpose on North America, thus high did our founders comprehend the fact. Our history had been more wonderful than the dreams of Oriental fancy. All the images of wealth, prosperity, and power that had ever thrilled the brain-pulses of the most ideal disciple of Plato, vanished into thin air before the form of Young American Liberty, rising from this fresh continent, proclaiming to the race freedom, order, and happiness for all. No such treasure had before been committed to men. When he spread this festival, he asked all nations to come. Hardly a day went by, but some winged messenger came from the Old World, freighted with hearts that were weary, seeking a |