ge military encampment; the hills around were white
with tents, and Pennsylvania Avenue was filled almost every day with
troops of horsemen, or with trains of artillery. While I was in
Washington I lodged with my beloved college professor, that eminent
Christian philosopher, Joseph Henry,--in the Smithsonian Institution, of
which he was the head. One night, after I had been out addressing our
boys in blue at one of the camps, and had retired for the night,
Professor Henry came into my room and, sitting down by my bed, discussed
the aspects of the struggle. His mental eye was as sharp in reading the
signs of the times as it had been when at Albany, thirty years before,
he made his splendid discovery in electro-magnetism. He said to me:
"This war may last several years, but it can have only one result, for
it is simply a question of dynamics. The stronger force must pulverize
the weaker one, and the North will win the day. When the war is over,
the country will not be what it was before; the triumph of the union
will leave us a prodigiously centralized government, and the old Calhoun
theory of 'State rights' will be dead. We shall have an inflated
currency--an enormous debt with a host of tax-gatherers, and huge
pension rolls. What is most needed now is wise statesmanship, and the
first quality of a statesman is _prescience_. In my position here, as
head of the Smithsonian, I cannot be a partisan! I did not vote the
Republican ticket, but I am confident that by a long way the most
far-seeing head in this land is on the shoulders of that awkward
rail-splitter from Illinois." Every syllable of Professor Henry's
prognostication proved true, and nothing more true than his estimate of
Lincoln at a time when there was too much disposition to distrust him.

As I have had for many years what my friends have playfully called
"Lincoln on the brain," let me say a few words in regard to the most
marvellous man that this country has produced in the nineteenth century.
His name is to-day a household word in every civilized land. Dr. Newman
Hall, of London, has told me that when he had addressed a listless
audience, he found that nothing was so certain to arouse them as to
introduce the name of Abraham Lincoln. Certainly no other name has such
electric power over every true heart from Maine to Mexico. The first
time I ever saw the man whom we used to call, familiarly and
affectionately, "Uncle Abe," was at the Tremont House in Chicago, a