luity--but oh, give us victory and power!' Out of such will as
this there come the greatest of men--giants of a fearfully glorious
future. When we look around and see this red-hot iron determination to
see all through to the victorious end, we may well feel assured that the
day of great ideas and of great men is not far off.

It is superb for a stranger to see how the spirit of the Revolution
still lives in New England, and is voiced and acted by men bearing
Revolutionary names--it is magnificent to behold the stream, grown to a
thunder-torrent, roaring and foaming over the broad West. Hurrah! it
still lives--that old spirit of freedom, its fires are all aflame, and
it shall not again smoulder until the whole world has seen, as it did
before, that it is the light of the world, and the pillar guiding as of
old to the promised land.

If 1861 had brought nothing else to pass it would be supremely great in
this, that amid toil and trial, foes within and without, it has seen the
American people determine that _Slavery_, the worm which gnawed the core
of its tree of life, shall be plucked out. _Out it shall go_, that is
settled. We have fought the foe too long with kid gloves, but now puss
will lay aside her mittens and catch the Southern rats in earnest. It is
the negro who sustains the South; the negro who maintains its army,
feeds it, digs its trenches, squires its precious chivalry, and is
thereby forced most unnaturally to rivet his own chains. There shall be
an end to this, and our administration is yielding to this inevitable
necessity. Here again the great year has worked a wonder, since in so
short a space it has made such an advance in discovering a basis by
which all Union men may conscientiously unite in freeing the black.
There have been hitherto two steps made towards the solution. The first
was that of the old Abolition movement, which saw only the suffering of
the slave and cried aloud for his freedom, reckless of all results. It
was humane; but even humanity is not always worldly wise, and it did
unquestionably for twenty years defeat its own aim in the Border States.
But it _worked_ most unflinchingly. Then came HELPER, who saw
that the poor white man of the South was being degraded below the negro,
and that industry and capital were fearfully checked by slavery. In his
well-known work he pointed out, by calm and dispassionate facts and
figures, that the land south of 'Mason and Dixon's' was being sacrificed