lfare of the people are still at stake.

If it is true that 'justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare
demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities,'
then those same holy principles were assailed when the war was begun. If
the United States Government was the assailant, it did wrong, and has
continued doing wrong ever since; and not a century of such wrong-doing
can make the war just and right on our part. This brings us face to face
with the question, Who began the war? Who, in this contest, has assailed
the principles of 'justice, humanity, and liberty'? Who has attacked the
'public welfare'? Has it been the United States Government? Let us
revert to the occasion of the war. Confining ourselves to what all
parties admit--even the rebels themselves--the immediate occasion of the
war was the election of a President distasteful, for whatever cause, to
the Southern leaders. Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the
United States under the organic law of the nation, in strict accordance
with all its modes and requirements, and none ever disputed the fairness
of the election. That organic law is the Constitution, to which the
South is bound equally with the North. The men of the Chicago
Convention, who have recalled to our minds its high supremacy, neglected
to express their opinion of those who, immediately on the election of
President Lincoln, contemptuously spurned it, and have sought these
three years and a half to overthrow it and destroy the Union which it
upholds.

Every sentiment of 'justice' was outraged when wicked sedition thus
without cause reared its head against the covenant of the nation. Every
instinct of 'humanity' was stifled by the traitors who surrounded a
gallant garrison of seventy men with a force of ten thousand, and opened
fire on the heroes who stood by the flag that had been the glory and
defence of both for more than half a century. 'Liberty,' in all its
blessed relations of home, and country, and religion, was struck at when
blind ambition thus set at defiance the power of the Union, to which
liberty owes its life on this continent, and its hopes throughout the
world. The constitutional liberty that is the glory of our civilization,
the liberty regulated by law that is the pride of our institutions, was
attacked by those who at Montgomery fiercely defied the Constitution and
laws. And what shall we say of the constitution which these traitors to
their country