for useful inventions than to their own?  War and non-intercourse will doubtless compel us to economy, and render labor cheaper in America, but they can not quench our innate Yankee-Saxon inventiveness and industry.  But if labor is made cheaper in America, then our final triumph will only be hastened.  If England seeks her own ruin, she could not advance it more rapidly than she would do by a war or a difference with us.  And this many think that she will do for the sake of one season’s supply of American cotton!  The fable of him who killed the goose for the sake of the golden egg becomes terrible when acted out by a great nation.  And if this be true, then the uplifted sword of Albion is, verily, nothing but a goose-killing knife.

‘God is not dead yet.’  If we are in the right, He will guide and guard us, and they who contend for right and justice and the liberty of the poor, first fully taught on earth by the Saviour Jesus Christ, will not suffer in the end.  When we first entered on this struggle with the South, it was soon realized that we had undertaken the greatest struggle of history, the reformation of the modern age, the grandest battle for progress and against the old serpent of oppression ever known.  Let them laugh who will, but such a trial of republicanism against the last of feudalism is this, and nothing less.  God aid us!  But it may be that, as the contest widens, grander accomplishments lie before us.  Whether it be done by the sword, or by peaceful industry; whether as victors, or as the unrighteously borne-down in our sorest hour of need,—­it is not impossible that, in one way or the other, it is yet in our destiny to refute the monstrous theory that whatever the most powerful nation on earth does is necessarily right, and that all considerations must yield to its enormous interests.  Such has been till the present the morality of English and of all European diplomacy,—­who will deny it?  Can it be possible that this is to last forever, and that nations are in the onward march of progress privileged to adopt a different course from that enjoined by God on individuals?  ‘Was Israel punished for this?’ No, it can not be.  We stand at the portal of a new age; step by step Truth must yet find her way even into the selfish camarilla councils of ‘diplomacy.’  Storms, sorrows, trials, and troubles may be before us,—­but we are working through a mighty time.  ‘Nothing without labor.’ Our task for the present is the restoration of the sacred Union.  From this let nothing turn us aside, neither the threats of England or of the world.  If we must be humiliated by the law, then let us bear the humiliation.  Our Great Master bore aforetime the most cruel disgrace in the same holy cause of vindicating the rights of man.  If new struggles are forced upon us, let us battle like men.  We are living now in the serious and the great,—­let us bear ourselves accordingly, and the end shall crown the work.