t, the more easily enthusiasm is
aroused toward it.

Now, the very head and front, the bone and marrow of Southern politics
for more than three decades, has been--slavery, and plans for its
aggrandizement and perpetuation. _That_ has been the ulterior object of
all the past vociferations about _State rights_ and _Southern rights_.
Slavery is country, practically, with them, and as it lay at the root of
their society, and its check or its extinction would, in their false
view, overturn society itself, it was easy for the scheming, cunning
leaders of the slave faction to adroitly transfer this enthusiasm, and
to raise the watchword, which never yet among any people has been raised
in vain, _Your homes and firesides_! When ever did women hear that cry
unmoved?

When _country_, that grand idea and object of human hope, pride, and
affection, had degenerated into a section; and when a false and
miserable _institution_, from its very nature terribly intimate with the
life of society, became the most substantial feature of that section;
what wonder if the war has at last, whatever it might have been at
first, come to the complexion of a contest for home and fireside with
the masses of the people, with the majority of the Southern women?

The magnificent dreams and projects, too, of a great slave empire, that
should swallow up territory after territory, and astonish the world with
its wealth, power, and splendor, which were fused into life in the
brains of the great apostles of slavery and secession, had their
influence on minds which, like the minds of the Southern women, have a
natural, innate love for the gorgeous, the splendid, the profuse, and
showy; minds ambitious of, and accustomed to, rule, and impatient of
control; minds already glazed over with the influence of the lying
assertion, proved to their uncritical, passionate judgment by all the
sophistical arguments of which their religious and political guides were
capable, that slavery is the very best possible condition for the black
man, and the relation of master the only true and natural one for the
white. I say, I do not wonder at the Southern women so much. I pity them
infinitely. Just think what they have been educated to believe, and then
say if there is not something sadly splendid in the very spirit of
endurance, of defiance, of sacrifice, however wrong and mistaken, they
have shown. I pity them profoundly, for they are drinking to the lees
the cup of suffer