by the sovereign nation of which that was the
representative. Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of the
North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had laid
hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his mother's
Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those battered walls waved
the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and most hope for in
the future,--the banner under which we became a nation, and which, next
to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of love and honor to
all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course of
events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name
humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please
themselves and their rebel friends by calling a "wicked war"; if under
any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the violence of
South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal combat,
in which we must either die or give the last and finishing stroke.

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter, Florida
would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia
the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would have anchored
under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of
the rebellion flying at their peaks. "Old Ironsides" herself would have
perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis
shaped for her figure-head at Norfolk,--for Andrew Jackson was a hater of
secession, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the
red-handed conspiracy. With all the great fortresses, with half the ships
and warlike material, in addition to all that was already stolen, in the
traitors' hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border States
have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the now
triumphant faction? Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
Tennessee,--saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by
fire,--have been in the day of trial? Into whose hands would the
Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the nation
as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in spite of the
volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered the roar of the
first gun at Sumter? Worse than all, are we permitted to doubt that in
the very bo