er, high or low, has ventured to seek votes on the avowal that he
was for giving up the Union. There have been much impugning of motives
and much heated controversy as to the proper means and best mode of
advancing the Union cause, but on the distinct issue of Union or no
Union the politicians have shown their instinctive knowledge that there
is no diversity among the people. In affording the people the fair
opportunity of showing one to another and to the world this firmness
and unanimity of purpose, the election has been of vast value to the
national cause.

The election has exhibited another fact not less valuable to be
known--the fact that we do not approach exhaustion in the most important
branch of national resources, that of living men. While it is melancholy
to reflect that the war has filled so many graves and carried mourning
to so many hearts, it is some relief to know that, compared with the
surviving, the fallen have been so few. While corps and divisions and
brigades and regiments have formed and fought and dwindled and gone out
of existence, a great majority of the men who composed them are still
living. The same is true of the naval service. The election returns
prove this. So many voters could not else be found. The States regularly
holding elections, both now and four years ago, to wit, California,
Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine,
Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire,
New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont,
West Virginia, and Wisconsin, cast 3,982,011 votes now, against
3,870,222 cast then, showing an aggregate now of 3,982,011. To this is
to be added 33,762 cast now in the new States of Kansas and Nevada,
which States did not vote in 1860, thus swelling the aggregate to
4,015,773 and the net increase during the three years and a half
of war to 145,551. A table is appended showing particulars. To this
again should be added the number of all soldiers in the field from
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Indiana, Illinois,
and California, who by the laws of those States could not vote away from
their homes, and which number can not be less than 90,000. Nor yet is
this all. The number in organized Territories is triple now what it
was four years ago, while thousands, white and black, join us as
the national arms press back the insurgent lines. So much is shown,
affirmatively and negatively, by