overcomes its resistance and puts the whole
machinery in motion. The rills of thought, shooting from the heights of
a few pure and lofty minds, have spread out into this sea of practical
Abolitionism which now covers the whole land,--although the sea may be
inclined to deny its source. May we, then, charge the pioneers of the
Anti-Slavery sentiment with having caused this war? In the same manner
we may regard the coming of Christ as being the cause of all the wars
and persecutions of Christianity.

If such is the force of earnest conviction, consider what we too may do.
We have gone to the polls and voted for the accomplishment of a certain
object: far more intelligently than at the beginning of the war, (for
few knew then what we were fighting for,) we have met the enemies of our
country, and defeated them at the ballot-box. But there is another and
no less important vote to be cast. The Twentieth Presidential Election
is not the last, even for this year. We are to continue casting our
ballots, every day, and day after day,--nay, year after year, if
necessary,--to the end. We have had political suffrage; but moral
suffrage is now called for. Here woman realizes her rights, so long
talked about, and so little understood; here, too, even the intelligent,
patriotic boy and girl can exert an influence. We know something of what
words can do; but how little we appreciate the power which is behind
words! By the wishes of your heart, by the aspirations of your soul, by
the energies of your mind and will, you form about you an atmosphere as
real as the air you breathe, although, like that, invisible. Not a
prayer is lost; not a throb of patriotish goes for nothing; never a wave
of impulse dies upon the ethereal deep in which we live and move and
have our being. Be filled with the truth as with life itself; let the
divine aura exhale from you wherever you move; and thus you may do more
to overcome the opposition to our cause than when you deposited your
ticket in the box. You may, perhaps, breathe the breath of life into the
nostrils of the coldest clay of conservatism you know: for true it is
that men not only catch manners, as they do diseases, one from another,
but that they catch unconscious inspiration also. Boswell, when absent
from London and his hero, acknowledged himself to be empty, vapid; and
he became somewhat only when "impregnated with the Johnsonian ether." So
the ether of your own earnest, fervent, patriotic cha