proudly spoken--as he turned the furrow,
stood by his work bench, or listened to the jarring clank of his
machinery, had mused with heavy heart and shame-flushed cheek how a
haughty, brutal, un-American spirit had drawn a line across the land,
and said, "Beyond this is _not_ your country. Here your free speech,
free labor, and free thought shall never come." While this line was
imaginary, he had waited for better days and larger thought to change
the current of the times; but when it was transformed into bristling
bayonets and frowning cannon, the tiger rose up within him, and with
unquestioning faith he took up the gauge of battle. Men talked of the
"cold blood of the North." That blood had surged impetuously through the
veins of warrior freemen for a hundred generations. Here in the New
World it had lost none of its vigor. The sturdy spirit that in other
years ruled the hand that wielded the battle-ax, still ruled, when the
hand was employed in subduing mountain and prairie. The North was averse
to war, because it was rising to that higher civilization that abhors
violence, discards brute methods, and relies on the intellectual and
moral. Such a people, driven to desperation, move right forward to the
accomplishment of their object with a scorn of cost or consequences
unknown to a lower type. Hence it is that the people of the North,
without hesitation, grappled with a rebellion the most formidable ever
successfully encountered by any government. For a like reason their
great armies, melting away like frost before the sun when the rebel flag
went down, mingled again with the people without jar or confusion.

Turning away from a half million graves, wherein they had buried their
slain, their bravest and best beloved, they forgot all bitterness for
joy that peace had come. No people in the world had greater reason for
severity than the victors in this strife. War, willful, unprovoked,
without the shadow of justification, had been thrust upon them. This had
been preceded by a series of usurpations the most unblushing ever
endured by a free people. These were a part of the plan of a band of
traitors, who had plotted for years to overthrow the existing order of
things, and establish an empire with human slavery for its chief
corner-stone.

The "Golden Circle," with its center at Havana, Cuba, its radii
extending to Pennsylvania on the North, the isthmus on the south, and
sweeping from shore to shore, was the bold dream of