the nationalities of the world, the battle for Humanity is, at this hour, in America.  A few days here would show you the disgusting composition of the Party which within the Union resists the national action.  Take from it the wild Irish element, imported in the last twenty-five year’s into this country, and led by Romish Priests, who sympathize, of course, with despotism, and you would bereave it of all its numerical strength.  A man intelligent and virtuous is not to be found on that side.  Ah! how gladly I would enlist you, with your thunderbolt, on our part!  How gladly enlist the wise, thoughtful, efficient pens and voices of England!  We want England and Europe to hold our people stanch to their best tendency.  Are English of this day incapable of a great sentiment?  Can they not leave caviling at petty failures, and bad manners, and at the dunce part (always the largest part in human affairs), and leap to the suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men?  This war has been conducted over the heads of all the actors in it; and the foolish terrors, “What shall we do with the negro?” “The entire black population is coming North to be fed,” &c., have strangely ended in the fact that the black refuses to leave his climate; gets his living and the living of his employers there, as he has always done; is the natural ally and soldier of the Republic, in that climate; now takes the place of two hundred thousand white soldiers; and will be, as the conquest of the country proceeds, its garrison, till peace, without slavery, returns.  Slaveholders in London have filled English ears with their wishes and perhaps beliefs; and our people, generals, and politicians have carried the like, at first, to the war, until corrected by irresistible experience.  I shall always respect War hereafter.  The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Life, Eternal Law, reconstructing and uplifting Society, —­breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider.  The dismal Malthus, the dismal DeBow, have had their night.

Our Census of 1860, and the War, are poems, which will, in the next age, inspire a genius like your own.  I hate to write you a newspaper, but, in these times, ’t is wonderful what sublime lessons I have once and again read on the Bulletin-boards in the streets.  Everybody has been wrong in his guess, except good women, who never despair of an Ideal right.

I thank you for sending to me so gracious a gentleman as Mr. Stanley, who interested us in every manner, by his elegance, his accurate information of that we wished to know, and his surprising acquaintance with the camp and military politics on our frontier.  I regretted that I could see him so little.  He has used his time to the best purpose, and I should gladly have learned all his adventures from so competent a witness.  Forgive this long writing, and keep the old kindness which I prize above words.  My kindest salutations to the dear invalid!