the hight of the far-off future, shall we see the country through which we are journeying in all its grand, sweeping outlines, its majestic proportions, and its imperial tints of coloring.  The days of peace and tranquillity in a nation as in a life are robed in colors sweet and grateful to the eye—­softened hues of green and gold—­but the days of war and tribulation are days of scarlet and crimson, and all that can be seen in heaven and earth is black and flame; but the days when Right achieves great triumphs, even through bloodshed and desolation, are days of imperial purple, hues royal in their magnificence.  Thank Heaven that, through the days of blood and black, we have at last reached the purple days of life as a nation.  A little more than a year of war, and now the skies are brightening.  Thank God! for they have been black, black, black with horror and suffering and crime.  And yet such a year as this, I am almost persuaded, is worth a score of years of peace.  It certainly has achieved more for truth and humanity and God than the score of years which preceded it.  As a nation, we had become almost despicable.  Such supple, yielding slaves of ‘Democratic’ demagogues; such cringing, fawning, knee-bending, hand-kissing agents of the diabolical, traitorous Slave-Power; such apologists and supporters of Wrong; such pusillanimous, weak-hearted advocates of the unpopular Right; such slaves to Cotton and its threats, that we had almost lost the God-given independence of American freemen, and seemed—­thank God! events have proved only seemed—­to be entirely given up to money and mechanics, to have become, indeed, a nation of peddlers.  So much so, indeed, that our prophets were stoned in their own lands, our apostles stricken down in the national councils, and the few voices that were raised for God and humanity, from out the miry slough of a trafficking age, were almost unheard in the general din which went up from all the nations, and the burden of whose song seemed to be:  ’There is no God but Cotton, and we are all his prophets.’  But the moment the first gun was fired, how all this changed!  How regally the whole nation rose up!  How magnificently she threw off the garment of rags and filth which had hidden her fair proportions, and donned the imperial toga of humanity, and wrapping the rich folds of the gorgeous mantle around her, stood out before the world in all the dignity of freedom and virtue—­a form which made the whole earth glad and the heavens clap their hands in exultation.  What giant leaps the nation made in manhood and heroism, strides following each other thick and fast, until the most cynical of the doubters of humanity began to open their eyes, and acknowledge that they would not have thought her capable of such unexampled deeds.  The national heroism which the Northern people have displayed is indeed unparalleled.  They have risen up as one man to the support of the Government.  They have offered property and life and the most sacred treasures