Let us advert to one fact very patent and significant.  We have heard of nearly all our successes through Rebel sources.  Even where it made against them, they could not help telling us (we do not say the truth, for that is rather strong, but) the news.  Never did two nations at war know one-tenth part as much of each other’s affairs.  Like husband and wife, the two parts of the country cannot keep secrets from one another, let them try ever so hard.  And the end of all will be that we shall know and respect one another a great deal better for our sharp encounter.

But this necessity of union demands of the Government, imperatively demands, that it take whatever step is necessary to its own preservation.  It is as with a ship at sea,—­all must pull together, or somebody must go overboard.  There can be no such order of things as an agreed state of mutiny,—­forecastle seceding from cabin, and steerage independent of both.

Not only is rebellion to be put down, therefore, but to be kept from coming up again.  It is obvious to every one, not thoroughly blinded by party, how it did come up.  The Gulf States were coaxed out, the Border States were bullied or conjured out.  A few leading men, who had made the science of political management their own, got the control of the popular mind.  One great secret of their success was their constant assumption that what was to be done had been done already.  It is the very art of the veteran seducer, who ever persuades his victim that return is impossible, in order that he may actually make it so.  North Carolina, as one expressively said, “found herself out of the Union she hardly knew how.”  Virginia was dragged out.  Tennessee was forced out.  Missouri was declared out.  Kentucky was all but out.  Maryland hung in the crisis of life and death under the guns of Fort McHenry.  In South Carolina alone can it be said that any fair expression of the popular will was on the Secession side.  The Rebellion was the work of a governing class, all whose ideas and hopes were the aggrandizement of their own order.  Terrorism opened the way, reckless lying made the game sure.  If any one is inclined to doubt this, let him look at the sway which Robespierre and his few associates exercised in Paris.  Some seventy executions delivered that great city from its nightmare agony of months.  A dozen resolute, united men, with arms and without scruples, could seize almost any New England village for a time, provided they knew just what they wanted to do.  Decision and energy are master-keys to almost most all doors not fortified by Hobbs’s patent locks.  A party of tipsy Americans one night stormed a Parisian guard-house, disarmed the sentry, and sent the guard flying in desperate fear, thinking that a general emente was in progress.  Now one issue of the Rebellion must be to put down, not only this governing class, but also the system from which it springs.  We have no such class