before our eyes the delivery of the
captive and the punishment of the oppressor. The greatest national sin
of Christian times has wrought the greatest national overthrow. The
hidden evil of the land, which long smouldered underground, has blazed
forth at last like a volcano, bursting in sunder the most solid of human
institutions, and pouring the lava-streams of ruin and desolation even
to the remotest shores where the spoil of guilt had been partaken. But
while we behold with awe, in the present calamity, the manifestation of
Supreme Justice, we look with confident hope to the final issue to which
it must lead. In whatever mode that end may be brought out, and through
whatever struggles America may yet be doomed to pass, we are assured
that only one termination can await a conflict between a nation which
has abjured its complicity with crime and a confederation which exists
but to perpetuate that crime forever. It is not now, in the presence of
the events of the last three years, that we shall be tempted to fear
that Wrong and Robbery, and the systematic degradation of woman, may
possibly prove to be principles of stability, capable of producing the
security and consolidation of a commonwealth! Your courage in this
Titanic strife,--the lavish devotion with which the best blood of your
land has been poured out on the field, and the tears of childless
mothers shed in homes never before visited by the sorrows of war,--the
patriotic generosity with which your treasures have been cast into the
gulf opened suddenly in your busy and prosperous land, even as of old
in the forum of ancient Rome,--these noble acts of yours inspire with
confidence in you, no less than pride in the indomitable energies of
our common race. But above your valor and your patriotism, we look with
still higher hope to those moral laws whose vindication is involved in
the issue of the conflict; and we feel assured, that, while for the
Slave-Power the future can hold no possibility of enduring prosperity,
for Free America it promises the regeneration of a higher and holier
national existence, when the one great blot which marred the glory of
the past shall have been expiated and effaced forever.

"This, Madam, is the belief and these are the hopes of thousands of
Englishmen. They are, we are persuaded, even more universally the
belief and hopes of the Women of England, whose hearts the complicated
difficulties of politics and the miserable jealousies of n