ir nefarious designs or mad dreams, have our brave soldiers
fought, suffered and bled for four years of the most terrible war in
modern times, and against troops as brave and as well led as
themselves; not for them has the country sacrificed a million of lives,
and contracted a debt of four thousand millions of dollars, besides the
waste and destruction that it will take years of peaceful industry to
repair. They and their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and
civilization has won its most brilliant victory in all history. The
American democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species
of barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and
placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate authority,
and made its natural association henceforth with all civilized
governments--not with the revolutionary movements to overthrow them.
The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative;
but they have learned a lesson, which they much needed against false
democracy: civil war has taught them that "the sacred right of
insurrection" is as much out of place in a democratic state as in an
aristocratic or a monarchical state; and that the government should
always be clothed with ample authority to arrest and punish whoever
plots its destruction. They must never be delighted again to have
their government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor
to his own sovereign as the nation's guest. The people of the Northern
States are hardly less responsible for the late rebellion than the
people of the Southern States. Their press had taught them to call
every government a tyranny that refused to remain quiet while the
traitor was cutting its throat or assassinating the nation, and they
had nothing but mad denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the
Neapolitan governments for their severity against conspirators and
traitors. But their own government has found it necessary for the
public safety to be equally arbitrary, prompt, and severe, and they
will most likely require it hereafter to co-operate with the
governments of the Old World in advancing civilization, instead of
lending all its moral support, as heretofore, to the Jacobins,
revolutionists, socialists, and humanitarians, to bring back the reign
of barbarism.

The tendency to individualism has been sufficiently checked by the
failure of the rebellion, and no danger from the disintegrating
element, eit