ged in the actual conflict took more
reasonable views, and the annals of the war are full of stories of
battlefield and hospital in which a common humanity asserted itself. But
brotherhood there was none. No alienation could have been more complete.
Into the cleft made by the disruption poured all the bad blood that had
been breeding from colonial times, from Revolutionary times, from
constitutional struggles, from congressional debates, from "bleeding
Kansas" and the engine-house at Harper's Ferry; and a great gulf was
fixed, as it seemed forever, between North and South. The hostility was
a very satisfactory one--for military purposes.

[Note: Needless to say, the conspiracy theory has long been discarded.
Mr. PAXSON, Professor of American History in the University of
Wisconsin, has devoted a volume to shew that while the South was
defending an impossible cause, it could not hold different views--that
these were the unavoidable result of environment and natural resources.
How different is all this from what the N. Y. Times lately reprinted
from its issue of April 17, 1865.

"Every possible atrocity appertains to this rebellion. There is nothing
whatever that its leaders have scrupled at. Wholesale massacres and
torturings, wholesale starvation of prisoners, firing of great cities,
piracies of the cruelest kind, persecution of the most hideous character
and of vast extent, and finally assassination in high places--whatever
is inhuman, whatever is brutal, whatever is fiendish, these men have
resorted to. They will leave behind names so black, and the memory of
deeds so infamous, that the execration of the slaveholders' rebellion
will be eternal."

True, "slaveholders' rebellion" still survives here and there. So
WILLIAM HARRISON CLARKE, in The Civil Service Law, Preface, says:

"Parties, when they strive solely for principle, are the life of a
nation; but when they strive solely for pelf, patronage, and power they
are its death. Even corrupt party leaders may destroy a republic;
sometimes even ambitious leaders may do so. Did a nation ever make a
narrower escape than did our own during the slaveholders' rebellion? Who
but ambitious party leaders caused that rebellion?"]

[Note: "Vous etes de France, mais je suis de Bretagne." "Eh bien! Ce
n'est pas le meme pays." "Mais c'est la meme patrie." La femme se borna
a repondre, "Je suis de Siscoingnard."--V. HUGO, Quatre-Vingt-Treize.]

The war began, the war went on,--t