00. That number of men is about one-tenth of those of proper
ages within the regions where, apparently, all are willing to engage; and
the sum is less than a twenty-third part of the money value owned by the
men who seem ready to devote the whole. A debt of $600,000,000 now is a
less sum per head than was the debt of our Revolution when we came out of
that struggle; and the money value in the country now bears even a greater
proportion to what it was then than does the population. Surely each man
has as strong a motive now to preserve our liberties as each had then to
establish them.

A right result at this time will be worth more to the world than ten times
the men and ten times the money. The evidence reaching us from the country
leaves no doubt that the material for the work is abundant, and that it
needs only the hand of legislation to give it legal sanction, and the hand
of the executive to give it practical shape and efficiency. One of the
greatest perplexities of the government is to avoid receiving troops
faster than it can provide for them. In a word, the people will save their
government if the government itself will do its part only indifferently
well.

It might seem, at first thought, to be of little difference whether the
present movement at the South be called "secession" or "rebellion." The
movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning they
knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by
any name which implies violation of law. They knew their people possessed
as much of moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order, and as much
pride in and reverence for the history and government of their common
country as any other civilized and patriotic people. They knew they
could make no advancement directly in the teeth of these strong and noble
sentiments. Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the
public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was
followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the
complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is that any State of
the Union may consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore
lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of
the Union or of any other State. The little disguise that the supposed
right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole
judges of its justice, is too thin to merit any not