ented suffered all
that she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell
on the smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that
was the representative. Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man
of the North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad
had laid hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his
mother's Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those battered
walls waved the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and
most hope for in the future,--the banner under which we became a nation,
and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of
love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds
of glory.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course
of events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name
humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please
themselves and their rebel friends by calling a "wicked war"; if under
any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the violence
of South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal
combat, in which we must either die or give the last and finishing
stroke.

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter, Florida
would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia
the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would have anchored
under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of
the rebellion flying at their peaks. "Old Ironsides" herself would have
perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis
shaped for her figure-head at Norfolk,--for Andrew Jackson was a hater
of secession, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the
red-handed conspiracy. With all the great fortresses, with half the
ships and warlike material, in addition to all that was already stolen,
in the traitors' hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border
States have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the
now triumphant faction? Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
Tennessee,--saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by
fire,--have been in the day of trial? Into whose hands would the
Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the nation
as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in spite of
the volcanic outburst of the startled