These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and business fabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strife thus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayer of every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonance to that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end, therefore, except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension, could a revival of old sectional and partisan passions—if it were possible—be expected to reach? V Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. Mulberry Sellers, Mark Twain’s hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciated the principle of “the old flag and an appropriation.” He did not claim the formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, his patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship. The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, “Old Pom,” as he had come to be called, whose oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equal facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist of the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was a ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembled Cruikshank’s pictures of Pecksniff. There have not been many “Old Poms” in our public life; or, for that matter Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people of God did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in far-away Judea, but were reserved to a later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, and that the American republic was ordained of God to illustrate upon the theater of the New World the possibilities of free government in contrast with the failures and tyrannies and corruptions of the Old, I do truly believe. That is the first article in my confession of faith. And the second is like unto it, that Washington was raised up by God to create it, and that Lincoln was raised up by God to save it; else why the militia colonel of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason that was obvious at the time, before all other men? God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that hung over the manager of our blessed Savior hung over the cradle of our blessed Union.