hold till it can be informed with Unity,
of which justice is the prime condition. See a Country at last, that
is, a Republican Soul, making the limbs of free states shiver with the
excitement of its great ideas, turning all our comfortable and excellent
institutions into ministers to execute its will, resolved, to wring the
great sinews of the body with the stress of its awakening, and to tax,
for a spiritual purpose, all the material resources and those forms
of liberty which we had pompously called our native land. A people in
earnest, smarting with the wounds of war and the deeper inflictions of
treachery, is abroad seeking after a country. It has been repeating with
annual congratulations for eighty years the self-evident truths of the
document which declared its independence; now it discovers that more
evidence of it is needed than successful trading and building can
bring, and it sends it forth afresh, with half a million of glittering
specialities to enforce its doctrines, while trade, and speculation, and
all the ambitions of prosperous men, and delicately nurtured lives, and
other lives as dearly cherished and nursed to maturity, are sent out
with an imperative commission to buy, at all hazards, a real country, to
exchange what is precious for the sake of having finally what we dreamed
we had before,--the most precious of all earthly things,--a Commonwealth
of God. Yes, our best things go, like wads for guns, to bid our purpose
speak more emphatically, as it expresses the overruling inspiration of
the hour.

Is this really the character of our war, or is it only an ideal picture
of what the war might be? That depends solely upon ourselves.

Our soldiers kindle nightly their bivouac fires from East to West, and
set their watch. They are the advance posts of the great idea, which is
destined to make a country as it advances southwardly, and to settle
it with republicans. If we put it in a single sentence, "Freedom of
industry for hand and brain to all men," we must think awhile upon it
before we can see what truths and temporal advantages it involves. We
see them best, in this night of our distress and trial, by the soldiers'
watch-fires. They encroach upon the gloom, and open it for us with
hopes. They shine like the stare of a deeper sky than day affords, and
we can see a land stretching to the Gulf, and lying expectant between
either sea, whose surface is given to a Republic to people and civilize
for the sa