berty, and the public welfare demand
that _immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities_.' Upon
this resolution there can be no better comment than the remembrance of
Donelson and Pea Ridge, Pittsburg Landing and Vicksburg, Murfreesboro'
and Chattanooga, Antictam and Gettysburg; not to speak of that splendid
series of battles from the Wilderness to Petersburg, which at last has
brought the rebel general to bay; nor of the glorious victories, since
the Chicago Convention, at Mobile and Atlanta, and in the Shenandoah
Valley. It can never be forgotten that on the fourth of July, 1863,
Governor Seymour, in a public discourse at the Academy of Music, in New
York, drew a deplorable picture of the straits to which the nation was
at last reduced, with the enemy marching defiantly across the fertile
fields of Pennsylvania, and men's hearts failing them for fear of
danger, not alone to the political capital, Washington, but also to the
financial capital, New York; and that, even while the words fell from
the speaker's lips, that defiant enemy, already beaten, was rapidly
retreating before the magnificent old Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg:
while victorious Grant had already broken the left of the rebel line,
and was celebrating the nation's anniversary in the triumph of
Vicksburg. Even so, let it never be forgotten that the delegates who
adopted this second resolution, so burdened with despair, had scarcely
reached their homes, ere the stronghold of the Southern Confederacy,
which, ever since the war was begun, has been boastfully proclaimed the
key of its military lines, and as impregnable as Gibraltar, fell before
the unconquerable progress of the armies of the West, under General
Sherman; and thus the rebel centre, as well as left, had been broken,
and only the rebel right, at Richmond, yet remains to the Southern army.

In further answer to the discouraging language of this resolution, let
us offset the following terse and comprehensive statement of what has
been accomplished in the course of the nation's 'experiment of war.' It
is copied from _The Evening Post_ of a recent date, and the writer
supposes the soldiers to speak thus:

'We have not failed; on the contrary, we have fought bravely and
conquered splendidly. In proof of our words we can point to such
trophies as few wars can equal and none surpass. Besides defending
with unusual vigilance and completeness two thousand miles of