disciplined for warfare.  Seven hundred thousand bayonets, as if by enchantment, bristled in menace to the slaveholders’ rebellion.  The navy-yards and arsenals resounded with the clang of hammers, and soon the suddenly created armaments appeared on the waters.  Power in finance exhibited by the Government, based on the confidence and patriotism of the people, was no less astonishing.  New inventions of warfare changed the scoffings in Europe into alarm for their own security.  The trans-Atlantic revilers of republicanism in America have discovered a people who had a heart in them.  Patriotism in America is reassured of success by the exhibition of a deep-seated attachment on the part of the Northman to his Government.  Seven words suffice to solve the riddle of free democratic strength—­THE MASSES CONVERTED INTO BEINGS OF POWER.  This is the theory, the basis, the strength of free institutions in America.  They have no other foundation.  They have nothing else to rely on for enduring support.

Let the Southern rebel attempt to disguise it as he may, the colored man of the South is already a patriot on the side of the Union.  He has heard of a people in the North who believed that every human being, by nature, was entitled ‘to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’  He knows that his oppressor hates this people of the North, and for the sole reason that they entertain this generous sentiment.  While the Pharisaic theologian of the Southern pulpit is expounding his Bible-doctrine in justification of kidnapping, and appealing to Heaven for assistance, the colored man turns in disgust at the impiety, and turns into secret places to beseech Omnipotence to favor the success of the national arms.  Perhaps there is an interfering Providence already manifest in results.  If the plagues of Egypt had been visited on the rebellious States by an overruling Power, they would scarcely have afforded a parallel to the calamity which rebel slaveholders have inflicted on their country.  They have exhausted and destroyed much of what the long toil of the colored man South had assisted to raise up.  Devastation has followed the train of rebellion.  The blood of the first and of the second-born has been the sacrifice on the altar of slavery.  The brutal ruffianism of the pro-slavery spirit has far enough disclosed its natural aptitudes to have become disgustingly odious in comparison with the positively better characteristics of the colored man.  The rebel himself has taught a lesson to the world, which he can never unteach.  The twenty-seven millions of free labor in the Union have learned a lesson through the teachings of slaveholders in rebellion, which they can not forget.  This teaching is nothing less than that the colored man is capable, by protection and encouragement, of being converted into a better element of national strength and national prosperity than slaveholders, as such, would ever become.