e of palaces.
No wonder that our ministers find the privileged orders willing to see
the ominous republic split 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