We, the inheritors of a sublime truth, have been grievously wanting in faith in our heritage!--wanting in aim and purpose to maintain its integrity! No wonder the land is still washed with tears of the widowed and fatherless, and that stricken mothers refuse to be comforted. Give us a living principle to die for. "Make this a war for emancipation!" cries anti-slavery England, "and our sympathies will be with you!" They demand much; but, that demand granted, it yet falls infinitely below the real point at issue. It is immeasurably short of the great conflict which we are actually waging. It is one phase of it,--the most acute phase, undoubtedly; but not, therefore, the broadest and most momentous one. Slavery was the peculiar institution of the South; but we, as a nation, have an incomparably greater peculiar institution of our own. The one is only peculiarly exceptional to our general policy; the other is essentially and organically at war with it. It is the only thing which pointedly distinguishes us from a dozen other nations. The consent of the governed is the sole, legitimate authority of any government! This is the essential, peculiar creed of our republic. That principle is on one side of this war; and the old doctrine of might makes right, the necessary ground-work of all monarchies, is on the other. It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles, which we call by the comprehensive term democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing. Slavery is malignantly aristocratic, and seems therefore to absorb all other manifestations of the principle into itself. It is Pharaoh's lean kine, which devour all the others of their species, and yet are no better favored than before. But if slavery were dead to-day, aristocracy might still grind our republic to powder. Men may cease to be slaves, and yet not be enfranchised. Although they are no longer bondmen, yet they may be governed without their own consent. But when you deny the universal enfranchisement of our people, you deny the one distinctive principle of our Government, and the only essential, fore-ordained fact in the future of our national institutions. We do not at all comprehend this.