From these dangers, which he faced like a man, we welcome him back to a country which is proud of his courage and ability and grateful for his services.  The highest and lowest classes of England cannot be in sympathy with the free North.  No dynasty can look the fact of successful, triumphant self-government in the face without seeing a shroud in its banner and hearing a knell in its shouts of victory.  As to those lower classes who are too low to be reached by the life-giving breath of popular liberty, we cannot reach them yet.  A Christian civilization has suffered them, in the very heart of its great cities, to sink almost to the level of Du Chaillu’s West-African quadrumana.  But the thoughtful, religious middle class of Great Britain, with their enlightened leaders and their conscientious followers among the laboring masses, have listened and will always listen to the voice of any true and adequate representative of that new form of human society now in full course of development in Republican North America.  They have never listened to a nobler and more thoroughly national speaker than the minister, clothed with full powers from Nature and bearing the authentic credentials from his Divine Master, to whom, on his return from his successful embassy, we renew our grateful welcome.

* * * * *

THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

A GREETING FOR THE NEW YEAR.

We are at the close of the third year of the Secession War.  It is customary to speak of the contest as having been inaugurated by the attack on Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861; but, in strictness, it was begun in December, 1860, when the Carolinians formally seceded from the Union, which was as much an act of war as that involved in firing upon the national flag that waved over the strongest of the Federal forts at Charleston.  Even those who insist that there can be no war without the use of weapons must admit that the act of firing upon the Star of the West, which vessel was seeking to land men and stores at Sumter, was an overt act, and as significant of the purpose of the Secessionists as anything since done by them.  That occurred in January, 1861; and because our Government did not choose to accept it as the beginning of those hostilities which had been resolved upon by the Southern ultras, it does not follow that men are bound to shut their eyes to the truth.  But we all took the insults that were offered to the flag in President Buchanan’s time as coolly as if that were the proper course of things, while the attack on Sumter had the same effect on us that the acknowledgment of the Pretender as King of Great Britain and Ireland by Louis XIV. had on the English.  War was then promptly accepted, and has ever since been waged, with that various fortune which is known to all contests, and which will be so known while wars shall be known on earth,—­in other words, while our planet shall be the abiding-place of men.  We have had victories, and we have had