clergymen, and slaves.  Now the soul of a Democracy, gazing terribly through eyes that are weeping for the dead and for indignation at the cause of their dying, holds the thing which we call Union, and determines to keep its mighty hold till it can be informed with Unity, of which justice is the prime condition.  See a Country at last, that is, a Republican Soul, making the limbs of free states shiver with the excitement of its great ideas, turning all our comfortable and excellent institutions into ministers to execute its will, resolved, to wring the great sinews of the body with the stress of its awakening, and to tax, for a spiritual purpose, all the material resources and those forms of liberty which we had pompously called our native land.  A people in earnest, smarting with the wounds of war and the deeper inflictions of treachery, is abroad seeking after a country.  It has been repeating with annual congratulations for eighty years the self-evident truths of the document which declared its independence; now it discovers that more evidence of it is needed than successful trading and building can bring, and it sends it forth afresh, with half a million of glittering specialities to enforce its doctrines, while trade, and speculation, and all the ambitions of prosperous men, and delicately nurtured lives, and other lives as dearly cherished and nursed to maturity, are sent out with an imperative commission to buy, at all hazards, a real country, to exchange what is precious for the sake of having finally what we dreamed we had before,—­the most precious of all earthly things,—­a Commonwealth of God.  Yes, our best things go, like wads for guns, to bid our purpose speak more emphatically, as it expresses the overruling inspiration of the hour.

Is this really the character of our war, or is it only an ideal picture of what the war might be?  That depends solely upon ourselves.

Our soldiers kindle nightly their bivouac fires from East to West, and set their watch.  They are the advance posts of the great idea, which is destined to make a country as it advances southwardly, and to settle it with republicans.  If we put it in a single sentence, “Freedom of industry for hand and brain to all men,” we must think awhile upon it before we can see what truths and temporal advantages it involves.  We see them best, in this night of our distress and trial, by the soldiers’ watch-fires.  They encroach upon the gloom, and open it for us with hopes.  They shine like the stare of a deeper sky than day affords, and we can see a land stretching to the Gulf, and lying expectant between either sea, whose surface is given to a Republic to people and civilize for the sake of Man.  Whoever is born here, or whoever comes here, brought by poverty or violence, an exile from misery or from power, and whatever be his ethnological distinction, is a republican of this country because he is a man.  Here he is to find safety, cooperation, and welcome.