“Is this then,” he breaks out fervently at the close of his paper, “to be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel about cotton? Shall there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism? Are we to have no cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold?--no cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen, who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours. Not only is it national life and a foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God’s own hand. If democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this cardinal truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great for its defence and establishment, then democracy will have vindicated itself beyond all chance of future cavil. Here, we think, is a Cause the experience of whose vicissitudes and the grandeur of whose triumph will be able to give us heroes and statesmen. The Slave-Power must be humbled, must be punished,--so humbled and so punished as to be a warning forever; but slavery is an evil transient in its cause and its consequence, compared with those which would result from unsettling the faith of a nation in its own manhood, and setting a whole generation of men hopelessly adrift in the formless void of anarchy.” The reserve with which he speaks of the President’s policy is the wise tone to be adopted in a printed article. In his private letters, where such caution is not needed, he gives expression openly to his impatience. In a letter written at the same time as this article, he says: “I confess that my opinion of the Government does not rise, to say the least. If we are saved it will be God’s doing, not man’s, and will He save those who are not worth saving? Lincoln may be right, for aught I know,--prudence is certainly a good drag upon virtue,--but I guess an ounce of Frémont is worth a pound of long Abraham. Mr. L. seems to have a theory of carrying on war without hurting the enemy. He is incapable, apparently, of understanding that they _ought_ to be hurt. The doing good to those that despitefully entreat us was not meant for enemies of the commonwealth. The devil’s angels are those that do his work, and for such there is a lake of fire and brimstone prepared. We have been undertaking to frighten the Devil with cold pitch.