It means Progress; and until we acknowledge this, all freedom is a vast injustice, luring men on to Beulahs which Fate—­the fate they worship—­will never have them reach.  It would be little enough to regain our foothold upon Southern territory, or repossess Southern forts, even if forts and territory have been wrested from us by treason and perjury, if with every mile of advance we did not gain a stronghold of principle.  We are not straining every nerve, struggling under immense financial burdens, wrenching away tender household ties, sacrificing cheerfully and eagerly private interests, brilliant prospects, and high hopes, only to prove that twenty millions of men are physically stronger than twelve.  God forbid!  This is no latter-day Olympic game, whoso victors are to be rewarded with the applause of a party or a generation.  All the dead heroes and martyrs of the past will crowd forward to offer their unheard thanks; all the years to come will embalm with blessings the memory of the patriots who open the door to wide advancement, prosperous growth, and high activity of a universal intelligence.

And among these brave men, whom the world shall delight to honor, let our deepest grief and our justest pride be for LYON.  We have given his honest life too little notice;—­this man whose sincerity was equalled only by his zeal; who, in a rarely surpassed spirit of self-abnegation, was content to lie down and die in the first heat of the great conflict, and to leave behind for more favored comrades the triumphal arches and rose-strewn paths of victory.  The world has known no truer martyr than he who fell at Wilson’s Creek, August 10th, 1861.

‘The history of every man paints his character,’ says Goethe; and scanty and imperfect as are the recorded details of General Lyon’s life, enough is known to prove him to have been high-minded and brave as a soldier, with a perseverance and a penetration that analyzed at once the platforms of contending factions, and read in their elements the principles which are to govern the future of our nation.

He came of the stout Knowlton stock of Connecticut, a family of whom more than one served England in the old French war, and afterward distinguished themselves against her in the Revolution.  We hear of the gallant Captain Knowlton at Bunker Hill, throwing up, in default of cotton, the breastwork of hay, which proved such an efficient protection to the provincials during the battle.  Once more he appears as colonel, at Harlem Plains, rushing with his Rangers (’Congress’ Own’) upon the enemy on the Plains, and, cut off shortly from retreat by reinforcements, fighting bravely between the foes before and their reserves behind, and, falling at last, borne away by sorrowing comrades, and buried at sunset within the embankments.  ‘A brave man,’ wrote Washington, ‘who would have been an honor to any country.’  With the memory of such a hero engrafted upon his earliest childhood, we can not wonder at the bent