If there was ever a sincere utterance on earth expressive of deeply religious faith, in spirit and in truth, it was in this address. And at this time not only President Lincoln, but an extraordinary number of people were inspired by a deeply earnest faith and feelings which few can _now_ realise. Men who had never known serious or elevated thoughts before, now became fanatical. The death of relatives in the war, the enormous outrages inflicted by the rebels on prisoners, the system of terrorism and cruelty which they advocated, had produced on the Northern mind feelings once foreign to it, and they were now resolved to go on, “in God’s name, and for this cause,” to the bitter end. With the feeling of duty to God and the Constitution and the Union, scores on scores of thousands of men laid down their lives on the battle-field. And it was characteristic of the South that, having from the beginning all the means at their command of cajoling, managing, and ruling the North, as easily as ever a shepherd managed sheep, they, with most exemplary arrogance, took precisely the course to provoke all its resistance. Soldiers who had not these earnest feelings generally turned into bounty-jumpers--men who took the premium for enlisting, and deserted to enlist again--or else into marauders or stragglers. But the great mass were animated by firm enthusiasm. I have been in several countries during wild times, and have seen in a French revolution courage amounting to delirium, but never have I seen anything like the zeal which burned in every Union heart during the last two years of the war of Emancipation. On the 6th March, 1865, Mr. Fessenden, the Secretary of the Treasury, voluntarily resigned, and Mr. Hugh M‘Culloch was appointed in his place. This was the only change in the Cabinet. On the 11th March, the President issued a proclamation, pardoning all deserters from the army, on condition that they would at once return to duty. This had the effect of bringing in several thousands, who materially aided the draft for 300,000, which was begun on the 15th March, 1865. And now the Southern Confederacy was rapidly hurrying down a darkening road to ruin--nor was it even destined to perish with honour, and true to its main principle; for, in their agony, its leaders even looked to the despised negro for help. It was proposed to the rebel Congress--and the measure was defeated by only one vote--that every negro who would fight for the Confederacy should be set free; which amounted, as Raymond declares, and as many rebels admitted, to a practical abandonment of those ideas of slavery for whose supremacy the rebellion had been set on foot. Of this proposition President Lincoln said--“I have in my life heard many arguments why the negroes ought to be slaves, but if they will fight for those who would keep them in slavery, it will be a better argument than any I have yet heard. He who would fight for that, ought to be a slave.”