might puzzle a plain man to answer. But opinion in such matters
is not determined by arguments, but by instincts. God, in his wrath, has
not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all
arguments are happily transitory in their effect, when they contradict
the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the
heart. And if wicked institutions, laboriously organized by dominant
tyranny and priestcraft, and strong with the might, not merely of bad
passions, but of perverted learning and prostituted logic,--if these
have been swept away in the world's advancing movement, it has been by
the gradual triumph of indestructible sentiments of freedom and
humanity, kept fresh and bright in the souls of the young.

And in the baptism of fire and blood through which our politics are
passing to their purification, who can fitly estimate our indebtedness
to the young men who are now making American history the history of so
much ardent patriotism and heroic achievement? When the civilization of
the country prepared to engage in a death-grapple with its
barbarism,--when the most beneficent of all governments was threatened
by the basest of all conspiracies, the most infamous of all treasons,
the most thievish of all rebellions,--and when that government was
sustained by the most glorious uprising that ever surged up from the
heart of a great people to defend the cause of liberty and honesty and
law,--did not the hot tide of that universal patriotism sparkle and
seethe and glow with special intensity in the breasts of our young men?
Did you ever hear from them that contented ignominy was Christian peace?
Did not meanness, falsehood, fraud, tyranny, treason, find in them, not
apologetic critics, but terrible and full-armed foes? Transient
defeat,--what did it but add new fiery stimulants to energies bent on an
ultimate triumph? To hint to them that Davis would succeed was not only
recreancy to freedom, but blasphemy against God. Better, to their
impassioned patriotism, that their blood should be poured forth in an
unstinted stream,--better that they, and all of us, should be pushed
into that ocean whose astonished waves first felt the keel of the
Mayflower, as she bore her precious freight to Plymouth Rock,--than that
America should consent to be under the insolent domination of a perjured
horde of slave-holders and liberticides. But that consent should never
be given, and that consent could never be