honor of a country’s admiration and the meed of her grateful thanks were his.  Soldier, orator and statesman, he had gained in a brilliant career a glory earned by few, and could well afford to die, assured of a memory justified from all reproach.  But to Lyon, whom there were so few to mourn, death in the midst of anticipated defeat was bitter indeed.  No time to retrieve the losses and disasters the cruel remissness of others had entailed upon him; the fruit of the anxious toil of months wrested from him even as it began to ripen; all his glad hopes chilled by suspicion, but his faith, we may well believe, still strong in the ultimate success of the cause he loved.  A whole life he had given to his country, and she had not thought it worth while to redeem it from disgrace with the few thousands that he asked.  He had outlived the elasticity of youth, when wrongs are quickly remedied, and new impulses spring, like phoenixes, from the ashes of the old.  Uncertain whether he were the victim of a conspiracy, the tool of a faction, or the martyr to some unknown theory, he died, and as the country had been to him wife and children, he left her his all.

It was known to but few that the soldier, whose career had been rather useful than brilliant, had, when the scheming of politicians and their doubly-refined arguments threatened to deceive and ruin the country, put by his sword and taken up the pen.  In a series of articles, short, concise, and to the point, he effectually canvassed the State.  They are addressed to thinking men everywhere.  Free from all trickery, strictly impartial, relying entirely upon the soundness of his premises for success,—­for elegance of diction he had not, and he was too honest even to become a sophist,—­these papers manifest at once the true patriot and the intelligent man.  Thousands of adherents the Republican cause had in 1860, but not one more indefatigable or more heartily in earnest than Lyon.  Outside the limits of party interests, and uninfluenced personally by the predominance of either faction, he had worked out in his own way the problem of national life, and now spread its solution before his readers.  ‘Our cause,’ said he, ’is to honor labor and elevate the laborer.’  Here we have the kernel of the whole matter; the spirit, if not the letter, of the whole republican system of government.  The secret that philosophers have elaborated from the unconquerable facts of physics, ethics, and psychology, that men of genius have evolved with infinite difficulty from the mass of crude aesthetic associations that cluster around every object of nature or of art, Lyon, working and thinking alone as a citizen, has discovered, with the sole aid of common sense and the habit of practical observation.  Carey and Godwin have proved by statistics for unbelievers the reasonableness of the doctrine enunciated by Lyon.  Now, thanks to the untiring efforts of a few stout-hearted patriots, it is no new one to the North; but in the late presidential