elves a public shame. The great revenge of years will
turn into a mere trick of literature the prose and verse of all not
inspired by devotion to humanity, zeal for the cause of the oppressed,
and a hearty love of truth, while every covering of lies shall be torn
away. They who have despised our free institutions, and prophesied our
downfall, and gloated by anticipation over the destruction of our
country, to get the lease of a hundred years more to their own lordship
of Church and State, and have put their faith in the oppressive Rebels
trying to build an empire on the ruins of the Ten Commandments, are as
blind to discern the laws of human nature as they are awkward to raise
the horoscope of events. This Western Continent, under God, may it
please the despots, is not going to barbarism and desolation. That good
missionary of freedom as well as religion, whom New England sent to
California in the person of Thomas Starr King, writes us that Mount
Shasta is ascertained to be higher than Mont Blanc. Some other
elevations than of the surface of the globe, in this hemisphere, the
Transatlantics may yet behold.

The pulpit is but a sympathetic deceiver, when it violates the truth it
is set to defend. All its lies are echoes of the avarice and inhumanity
sitting in the pews; and when, in the rough old figure, it is a dumb dog
that will not bark at the robber or warn us of danger, the real mutes,
whom its silence but copies, are those demure men below who seem to
listen to its instructions.

We are astonished to find a liar in the lightning of heaven over the
telegraphic wires. Let us get over our surprise. The lie is human
altogether, not elemental at all. The operator has his private object to
carry, the partisan his political end to serve, the government itself
flatters the people it fears with incorrect accounts of military
movements and fortified posts and the numbers of dead and wounded on
either side. Kinglake calls the telegraph a device by which a clerk
dictates to a nation. Who but the nation, or some part of it, dictates
to the clerk? He does not control, but records, the sentiment of the
community in all his invented facts; and when we hear the click or read
the strange dots, we want some trustworthy voucher or responsible human
auditor even of these electric accounts.

But, creatures of sympathy, needy dependants on approbation, as we are,
shall we surrender to all or any of these lies? No,--there is a sympathy