We are fighting for our existence.  We say to those who would take back their several contributions to that undivided unity which we call the Nation; the bronze is cast; the statue is on its pedestal; you cannot reclaim the brass you flung into the crucible!  There are rights, possessions, privileges, policies, relations, duties, acquired, retained, called into existence in virtue of the principle of absolute solidarity,—­belonging to the United States as an organic whole, which cannot be divided, which none of its constituent parties can claim as its own, which perish out of its living frame when the wild forces of rebellion tear it limb from limb, and which it must defend, or confess self-government itself a failure.

We are fighting for that Constitution upon which our national existence reposes, now subjected by those who fired the scroll on which it was written from the cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those chances which the necessities of war entail upon every human arrangement, but still the venerable charter of our wide Republic.

We cannot fight for these objects without attacking the one mother cause of all the progeny of lesser antagonisms.  Whether we know it or not, whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against the system that has proved the source of all those miseries which the author of the Declaration of Independence trembled to anticipate.  And this ought to make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully.  There were Holy Wars of old, in which it was glory enough to die, wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels.  The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine!  He rose from that burial-place more than eighteen hundred years ago.  He is crucified wherever his brothers are slain without cause; he lies buried wherever man, made in his Maker’s image, is entombed in ignorance lest he should learn the rights which his Divine Master gave him!  This is our Holy War, and we must fight it against that great General who will bring to it all the powers with which he fought against the Almighty before he was cast down from heaven.  He has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for him; he has bribed many a smooth-tongued preacher to be his chaplain; he has engaged the sordid by their avarice, the timid by their fears, the profligate by their love of adventure, and thousands of nobler natures by motives which we can all understand; whose delusion we pity as we ought always to pity the error of those who know not what they do.  Against him or for him we are all called upon to declare ourselves.  There is no neutrality for any single true-born American.  If any seek such a position, the stony finger of Dante’s awful muse points them to their place in the antechamber of the Halls of Despair,—­

         “—­With that ill band

Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,
Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
Were only.”