g a smoking desolation and a ruined
society. The Northern army moves slowly, because it carries American
civilization in its knapsack and baggage wagons, organizes republican
society as it goes, and prepares to hold for liberty all it has gained.
The people's army has paved the way for liberty and a democratic order
of society over two hundred thousand square miles, among four millions
of people, in three years. New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Beaufort,
Alexandria, every slave city in our possession, is being made over into
a free city.

The army goes slow because it is only the people's pioneer to level the
mountains and fill up the valleys, and construct the highway of liberty
from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. The Secretary of State has well
said: '_The war means the dissolution of slave society._' It was entered
into with the distinct understanding that it was the last expedient to
save the negro oligarchy from ruin, and every day it goes on its
thundering course it more emphatically pronounces its doom. The war for
the Union is the people's final contest for liberty, a contest in which
they will be victorious, as in the strife of industry, morals, and
politics. The people, like John Brown's soul, are 'marching on' to
dissolve the slave oligarchy and establish democracy. The people now
possess three fourths the territory, population, and wealth of the
republic. There are yet some six million black and white people in the
South to rescue from their masters, who now use them against us. They
are being prepared for Union with us by this war. The poor white man
will be made better, more intelligent, more ambitious even, by service
in the rebel army, and on the return of peace will become the small
farmer of a free soil. The black men will be raised, in due time made
freemen, and start as a free peasantry on a new career. A hundred
thousand slaveholders, with their families, not more than one million of
people in all, will hate the Union permanently. They will be defeated,
we hope and believe, and disorganized as a social and political power,
and the people rule in every State they have cursed by their ambition
for the last fifty years.

We do not prophesy just when or how the people will triumph. The
victory, we believe, will come; but whether all at once, or through
temporary revulsions of purpose and alternate truce and war, whether
finished by arms or yet cast again into the arena of polities, whether
by occupyin