danger and of suffering, it is that of
unfading glory and of imperishable renown. The question with us is that
of national unity and existence, and compromise is treason. To
acknowledge the doctrine of secession, to abdicate the power of
self-preservation, and permit the Union to be dissolved or
disintegrated, is ruin, disgrace, and suicide. We must fight it out to
the last. If necessity requires, we can live at home, and reverses or
intervention should only increase our efforts. If need be, all--_all_
who can bear arms, must take the field, and leave to those who can not,
the pursuits of industry. If we count not the cost of the struggle in
men or means, it is because the value of the Union can not be estimated.
If martyrs from every State, and from nearly every nation of
Christendom, have fallen in our defense, never, in humble faith, we
trust, has any blood, since that of Calvary, been shed in a cause more
holy.

Our armies, eventually, must triumph, but to restore, throughout the
revolted States, the supremacy of the Constitution, we must continue to
maintain the just distinction between the loyal and disloyal; the
deluded masses and the rebel leaders. We must also remember, that the
reign of terror has long been supreme in the South, and that thousands
have been forced into apparent support of the rebellion by threats, by
spoliation, by conscription, by the ruin of their homes, and the loss of
their means of subsistence.

With the exception of South-Carolina, whose normal condition for more
than thirty years before she struck down our flag at Sumter, was that of
incipient treason and revolt, no other State really desired to destroy
the Union. A secret association and active armed conspiracy, and an
organized system of falsehood and misrepresentation, drove the masses,
by sudden action, violence, and terror, into this rebellion; but a large
majority of the aggregate popular vote of the South was against
secession.

It was a Northern President, yielding to secession leaders, in
opposition to the patriots of the South, who, by the whole power of
Executive influence and patronage, attempted to force slavery into
Kansas, by the crime, heretofore without a name or an example, the
FORGERY OF A CONSTITUTION. This was the tolling of the first bell,
alarming to patriots, but the concerted signal for the grand movement of
the assassins, then conspiring the death of the Union. It was also a
Northern President who urged the