It was God's will that this nation--the North as well as the South--should deeply and terribly suffer for the sin of consenting to and encouraging the great oppressions of the South; that the ill-gotten wealth which had arisen from striking hands with oppression and robbery, should be paid back in the taxes of war; that the blood of the poor slave, that had cried so many years from the ground in vain, should be answered by the blood of the sons from the best hearth stones through all the free States; that the slave mothers, whose tears nobody regarded, should have with them a great company of weepers, North and South--Rachels weeping for their children and refusing to be comforted; that the free States, who refused to listen when they were told of lingering starvation, cold, privation and barbarous cruelty, as perpetrated on the slave, should have lingering starvation, cold, hunger and cruelty doing its work among their own sons, at the hands of these slave masters, with whose sins our nation had connived. General McClellan was like those kings and leaders we read of in the Old Testament, whom God sent to a people with a purpose of wrath and punishment. Slowly, through those dark days of rebuke and disaster, did the people come at last to a consciousness that they had trusted in vain--that such a continued series of disasters were not exceptions and accidents, but evidences of imbecility and incompetence in the governing power. Meanwhile the magnitude of this colossal war had fully revealed itself--a war requiring combinations and forces before unheard of, as different from those of European battles as the prairies of the West differ from Salisbury Plain, or the Mississippi from the Thames--and we again feverishly asked, Where is our leader? We had faith that some man was to arise; but where was he? Now one General, and now another took the place of power, and we hoped and confided, till disaster and reverses came and threw us on our unanswered inquiry. Now it is very remarkable that in all great crises and convulsions of society, the man of the hour generally comes from some obscure quarter--silently, quietly, unannounced, unheralded, without prestige, and makes his way alone and single-handed. John the Baptist said to the awakened crowd, thrilling with vague expectation of a coming Messiah, "There standeth one among you whom ye know not," and the same declaration might amount to a general principle, which would hold good in most cases when the wants of a new era in society call for a new leader.