e Federal Government was compelled to take up
the gage of battle which the rebels had so vauntingly thrown down? Not
merely the interests of civil authority and order, but the preponderance
of freedom, and the claims of humanity on this continent, required the
most determined resistance to be made, and forbade the possibility of
quietly surrendering the destinies of the nation into the hands of the
traitors who sought to destroy it, What a spectacle of imbecility and
miserable failure in the hour of great peril would have been presented
to the indignant world, if, in this great crisis, the national
authorities had been so far beneath the occasion as to have declined the
proffered contest and basely betrayed their trust, at the first demand
of the seceding States! The everlasting scorn of mankind would have
overwhelmed and blasted the dastard and degenerate race, who would thus
have sacrificed the highest and most sacred interests of humanity.
Rather than this, welcome the civil war, with all its sacrifices!
Welcome privations, labors, taxes, wounds, death, and all the nameless
horrors that swarm along the red path of civil strife! Thousands of
precious lives and billions of treasure have already been expended, and
yet no patriotic heart thinks of turning back from the battle field,
until the Union established by our fathers shall be restored to its
integrity.

Compelled to admit the conclusions already stated, let us not do
injustice even to the men who are prominent in this iniquitous
rebellion. The most difficult of all moral problems is to determine how
far individual agency can control social or political events, and what
degree of responsibility attaches to those who have been apparently
influential in producing disastrous results. An impartial study of
history will serve to establish the truth that prominent men who, in any
age, may seem to have produced great changes by their individual will,
were merely the instruments of society by which irresistible tendencies
were carried out to their necessary ends. The very conceptions of such
men are the offspring of their times, and in order that they should have
power to accomplish their designs, the great social forces of the
community must be at their disposal, ready and inclined to perform the
work. A great rock or a mighty glacier may be so balanced at the
mountain top, that a small force--the sound of a trumpet, a mere breath
of air--may dislodge it, and cause it to