plit into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing the other, and
standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be
pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that
broken chalice which held the poisonous draught of liberty!

We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights. We know
our friends, and they are the foremost champions of political and social
progress. The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John Bright have both
been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man of the people has
been true to the cause of the people. That deep and generous thinker,
who, more than any of her philosophical writers, represents the higher
thought of England, John Stuart Mill, has spoken for us in tones to which
none but her sordid hucksters and her selfish land-graspers can refuse to
listen. Count Gasparin and Laboulaye have sent us back the echo from
liberal France; France, the country of ideas, whose earlier inspirations
embodied themselves for us in the person of the youthful Lafayette.
Italy,--would you know on which side the rights of the people and the
hopes of the future are to be found in this momentous conflict, what
surer test, what ampler demonstration can you ask--than the eager
sympathy of the Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling
many, and the dread of their oppressors, wherever it is spoken, the
heroic Garibaldi?

But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is
granted that it is for no base end, but first for the life of the nation,
and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of mankind,
for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as against
oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth which neither the
unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may still be
that the strife is hopeless, and must therefore be abandoned. Is it too
much to say that whether the war is hopeless or not for the North depends
chiefly on the answer to the question, whether the North has virtue and
manhood enough to persevere in the contest so long as its resources hold
out? But how much virtue and manhood it has can never be told until they
are tried, and those who are first to doubt the prevailing existence of
these qualities are not commonly themselves patterns of either. We have
a right to trust that this people is virtuous and brave enough not to
give up a just and necessary contest befor