ations seem to be rocked on the fiery waves of the central abyss,
and every living creature on its surface becomes agitated with profound
dismay. States have been temporarily but rudely torn from their long and
peaceful connections with sister States, and great rents in the
political soil, filled with the bodies of slaughtered citizens, mark the
lines of separation. Vast armies have been assembled and organized, and
have met each other in the shock of battle, on fields made slippery with
fraternal blood, where tens of thousands have fallen to rise no
more--swept down by the relentless storm of iron hail with which brother
has greeted brother in this most unholy war. The measured tramp of the
armed hosts has shaken the continent; and the vengeful cries of the
unnatural strife have disturbed the inmost peaceful recesses of its
great central plains and mountains. From California to Texas; from
Colorado to New Mexico; from Maine to New Orleans; from the great lakes
to the coasts of the Carolinas; and along the measureless length of 'the
father of waters' and his great tributaries, the gathering armies have
marched or sailed, and swarmed to the beat of the drum and the sound of
the trumpet. More than a million of men, on both sides, have been
engaged in these tremendous movements, which unhappily correspond too
well in their unexampled magnitude with the physical character of our
magnificent country. Civil war has sacrilegiously usurped the mighty
instrumentalities of modern peaceful life; and the bloody and
destructive work of these vast armies is not less gigantic in scale than
have been the ordinary operations of our wonderful industry and our
ever-increasing commerce. The sacrifice of life, the destruction of
property, the desolation of extensive regions of beautiful and fertile
country, the vast expenditure of public means, all concur to
characterize this as the grandest and most terrible phenomenon of the
kind that has ever occurred in the history of man. To us, who are in the
midst of it, and destined to be involved in its results, whatever they
may be, it is a subject of deep and awful interest; and while the scenes
of the momentous drama are continually shifting around us and presenting
new spectacles of slaughter and disaster every day, it is hardly
possible to maintain the calmness necessary for an impartial
appreciation of the causes which have been sufficiently powerful to turn
the destructive energies of so great