them.  They are to civil affairs what the natural laws are to health—­indispensable conditions of peace and happiness.  What are the ordinances given by the people, speaking out of fire and darkness of war, with authority inspired by that same God who gave the law from Sinai amid thunders and trumpet voices? 1.  That these United States shall be one and indivisible. 2.  That States have not absolute sovereignty, and have no right to dismember the Republic. 3.  That universal liberty is indispensable to republican government, and that slavery shall be utterly and forever abolished.

Such are the results of war!  These are the best fruits of the war.  They are worth all they have cost.  They are foundations of peace.  They will secure benefits to all nations as well as to ours.  Our highest wisdom and duty is to accept the facts as the decrees of God.  We are exhorted to forget all that has happened.  Yes, the wrath, the conflict, the cruelty, but not those overruling decrees of God which this war has pronounced.  As solemnly as on Mount Sinai, God says, “Remember! remember!” Hear it to-day.  Under this sun, tinder that bright child of the sun, our banner, with the eyes of this nation and of the world upon us, we repeat the syllables of God’s providence and recite the solemn decrees:  No more Disunion!  No more Secession!  No more Slavery!  Why did this civil war begin?  We do not wonder that European statesmen failed to comprehend this conflict, and that foreign philanthropists were shocked at a murderous war that seemed to have no moral origin, but, like the brutal fights of beasts of prey, to have sprung from ferocious animalism.  This great nation, filling all profitable latitudes, cradled between two oceans, with inexhaustible resources, with riches increasing in an unparalleled ratio, by agriculture, by manufactures, by commerce, with schools and churches, with books and newspapers thick as leaves in our own forests, with institutions sprung from the people, and peculiarly adapted to their genius; a nation not sluggish, but active, used to excitement, practiced in political wisdom, and accustomed to self-government, and all its vast outlying parts held together by the Federal government, mild in temper, gentle in administration, and beneficent in results, seemed to have been formed for peace.  All at once, in this hemisphere of happiness and hope, there came trooping clouds with fiery bolts, full of death and desolation.  At a cannon shot upon this fort, all the nation, as if it had been a trained army lying on its arms, awaiting a signal, rose up and began a war which, for awfulness, rises into the front rank of bad eminence.  The front of the battle, going with the sun, was twelve hundred miles long; and the depth, measured along a meridian, was a thousand miles.  In this vast area more than two million men, first and last, for four years, have, in skirmish, fight, and battle, met in more than a thousand conflicts; while a coast