t the contest, had not required this
link for the completion of its chain,--the wishes of the people
most directly involved would never have had the slightest attention
from the Congress of the United States. Strong and equitable as
was the case of West Virginia, irritating and undesirable as her
relations to the older State might be, advantageous to the people
as the new government might prove, these considerations would not
of themselves have offered sufficient inducement to engage the
attention of Congress for an hour at that critical period. They
would have been brushed aside and disregarded with that cool
indifference by which all great legislative bodies prove how easy
it is to endure the misery of other people. West Virginia indeed
got only what was equitably due, and what she was entitled to claim
by the natural right of self-government. The war brought good
fortune to her as conspicuously as it brought ill fortune to the
older State from which she was wrenched. West Virginia is to be
congratulated, and her creditable career and untiring enterprise
since she assumed the responsibilities of self-government show how
well she deserved the boon. But the wounds inflicted on the mother
State by her separation will never be healed until Virginia is
relieved from the odium of having been specially selected from the
eleven seceding States for the punishment that struck at once
against her prosperity and against her pride of empire.

Nor should it be forgotten that the State of Virginia before the
war might well be regarded as the creditor and not the debtor of
the National Government. One of her earliest acts of patriotism as
an independent State was the cession to the General Government of
her superb domain on the north side of the Ohio River, from the
sale of which more than one hundred millions of dollars have been
paid into the National Treasury. A suggestive contrast is presented
to-day between the condition of Virginia and the condition of Texas
and Florida. It was the aggressive disunionism of the two latter
States which aided powerfully in dragging Virginia into rebellion.
But for the urgency of the seven original Confederate States, in
which Texas and Florida were numbered, Virginia Loyalists would
have been able to hold their State firm in her National allegiance.
Since the war Texas has traveled the highway to wealth and power,
founded on the ownership of her public lands, of which the National
Gove