“—­Fame of them the world hath none
Nor suffers; mercy and justice scorn them both. 
Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by.”

We must use all the means which God has put into our hands to serve him against the enemies of civilization.  We must make and keep the great river free, whatever it costs us; it is strapping up the forefoot of the wild, untamable rebellion.  We must not be too nice in the choice of our agents.  Non eget Mauri jaculis,—­no African bayonets wanted,—­was well enough while we did not yet know the might of that desperate giant we had to deal with; but Tros, Tyriusve,—­white or black,—­is the safer motto now; for a good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.  The iron-skins, as well as the iron-clads, have already done us noble service, and many a mother will clasp the returning boy, many a wife will welcome back the war-worn husband, whose smile would never again have gladdened his home, but that, cold in the shallow trench of the battle-field, lies the half-buried form of the unchained bondsman whose dusky bosom sheathes the bullet which would else have claimed that darling as his country’s sacrifice.

We shall have success if we truly will success, not otherwise.  It may be long in coming,—­Heaven only knows through what trials and humblings we may have to pass before the full strength of the nation is duly arrayed and led to victory.  We must be patient, as our fathers were patient; even in our worst calamities, we must remember that defeat itself may be a gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than it costs ourselves.  But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty, this generation is disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if we have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a nation of sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who vindicated the insulted majesty of the Republic, and struck at her assailants so long as a drum-beat summoned them to the field of duty.

Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women of the North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood for your temporal salvation.  They bore your nation’s emblems bravely through the fire and smoke of the battle-field; nay, their own bodies are starred with bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of the soil which they defended.  In every Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this destroying struggle.  Many whom you remember playing as children amidst the clover-blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over them.  By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children’s children yet unborn,