The victorious armies had marched home and into history. The two days of review at the end of May was a spectacle not likely to be forgotten by those who saw it or did not see it. It belonged to that series of events for which there is no precedence, because there never was before a continental republic. Like every remarkable occurrence in these remarkable days of ours, the disbanding of the armies of the East and West, and their quiet absorption into the mass of the people, is a spectacle which has another illustration to the extreme practicability of a popular government. Usually the return of the victorious army is dreaded by its country somewhat as its advance is by the enemy, and government provides other wars to employ it. But our men are citizens who have been defending their own rights. It is their own government they have been maintaining. The endeavor to represent the government as a power different from the people and dangerous to their liberty has failed several times during the war, and will always fail so long as the broadest base of the government is jealously guarded. And nothing is more honorable to human nature, nothing so truly vindicates the wisdom of our institutions and the faith that supports them, than that during the Civil War, of which the event seemed sometimes doubtful, there has not been even the suspicion of a desire upon the part of any popular general to seize power and dictate to the authorities. Indeed, in the only instance in which such a whisper was breathed the suggestion was known to come from the politicians who surrounded the general, and not from himself.