It is such a people, planted on our borders and aroused for the first
time to an exhibition on a large scale of those abiding and augmenting
national attributes and propensities which have thus been indicated,
with whom we are now brought into hostile array. They are at present
trying their hand at the collective and organic activities of a national
cutthroatism which, in an individual and sporadic way, has for many
years past constituted the national life of that people. Who at the
North, at the commencement of the war, impressively understood these
facts? Who even now sees and knows, as the fact is, that the military
success of Jefferson Davis; that his triumphant march on Philadelphia,
New York, and Boston--as they of the South threaten, and intend if they
have the power, and have already twice unsuccessfully attempted--would
terminate not, in a separation of these States by a permanent disruption
of the old Union; nor in new compromises of any kind whatsoever; but in
the absolute conquest of the whole North--not conquest even in any sense
now understood among civilized people; but conquest with more than all
the horrors which fourteen centuries ago were visited on Southern Europe
by the overwhelming avalanche of Northern barbarian invasion?--that in
that event, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of
locomotion without question, freedom in any sense which makes life
valuable to the man once educated into the conception of freedom, is
lost?--that the whole progress of modern civilization and development,
as it has been working itself out in the Northern American States, would
not only be diverted from its course, but positively reversed and made
to contribute all its accumulations of power to the building up, not of
the temple of Freedom for the blessing of the nations, but of an
infernal pantheon of Despotism and human oppression?

The North was forced, reluctantly and unwillingly, into this war: with
her as yet it has hardly become a matter of earnest. She has endeavored
to carry it on considerately and tenderly, for the well-being of the
South as well as of the North, much in the spirit of a quiet Quaker
gentleman unexpectedly set upon by a drunken rowdy, 'spoiling for a
fight,' and whom in his benevolence and surprise, he is anxious indeed
to restrain, but without inflicting on him serious injury. In an
especial degree was this tenderness felt on the part of the Government
and people of the North to