We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights.  We know our friends, and they are the foremost champions of political and social progress.  The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John Bright have both been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man of the people has been true to the cause of the people.  That deep and generous thinker, who, more than any of her philosophical writers, represents the higher thought of England, John Stuart Mill, has spoken for us in tones to which none but her sordid hucksters and her selfish land-graspers can refuse to listen.  Count Gasparin and Laboulaye have sent us back the echo from liberal France; France, the country of ideas, whose earlier inspirations embodied themselves for us in the person of the youthful Lafayette.  Italy,—­would you know on which side the rights of the people and the hopes of the future are to be found in this momentous conflict, what surer test, what ampler demonstration can you ask—­than the eager sympathy of the Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling many, and the dread of their oppressors, wherever it is spoken, the heroic Garibaldi?

But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is granted that it is for no base end, but first for the life of the nation, and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of mankind, for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as against oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth which neither the unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may still be that the strife is hopeless, and must therefore be abandoned.  Is it too much to say that whether the war is hopeless or not for the North depends chiefly on the answer to the question, whether the North has virtue and manhood enough to persevere in the contest so long as its resources hold out?  But how much virtue and manhood it has can never be told until they are tried, and those who are first to doubt the prevailing existence of these qualities are not commonly themselves patterns of either.  We have a right to trust that this people is virtuous and brave enough not to give up a just and necessary contest before its end is attained, or shown to be unattainable for want of material agencies.  What was the end to be attained by accepting the gage of battle?  It was to get the better of our assailants, and, having done so, to take exactly those steps which we should then consider necessary to our present and future safety.  The more obstinate the resistance, the more completely must it be subdued.  It may not even have been desirable, as Mr. Mill suggested long since, that the victory over the rebellion should have been easily and speedily won, and so have failed to develop the true meaning of the conflict, to bring out the full strength of the revolted section, and to exhaust the means which would have served it for a still more desperate future effort.  We cannot complain that our task