We are aware that your Union principles have cost you something--cost you everything but life, and that which, to every true man, is dearer than life,--honor and rectitude. We bid you a warm welcome on this account. Situated as we have been, we deserve no praise for being Union men. To be otherwise would be to serve the devil just for its own sake. It would be like chopping off our hands just to see the blood run, or thrusting them into the fire just to feel the pain. But with you the case has been different. Spurning bribes and offers of aggrandizement, scorning the threats and terrors of traitors, you have preferred to suffer privations, afflictions and imprisonment, rather than prove false to the Government that has protected us all. By thus, in the face of danger and death, taking your stand so nobly against all odds, all hazards, all temptations, and machinations of wicked seducers, you have won the undying admiration of a grateful people. Your deeds have thus become so interwoven with the most eventful period in the annals of our country, that your name is henceforth to be a household word, so long as the American Republic shall live in fact or in history. Yours is the proud satisfaction of having done right for its own sake, in the face of powerful temptations to do wrong, and you have your reward. And if a very unpoetic man may be allowed to amend a couplet familiar to our school-boy days, I would venture to say: "And more true joy the Parson exiled feels Than Davis, with the traitors at his heels." But, thank God, you are no longer exiled or imprisoned. A tide has come in your affairs to bear you on to fortune. And it will be nothing strange, and no more than justice, if the same State which has confiscated your property, and imprisoned your person, should conclude to honor herself by honoring you, and shall yet say to you, "Well done good and faithful servant; be thou ruler over ten cities." All that is necessary to the Union cause is enough of this same earnest, unflinching, unchanging determination to face and destroy this monstrous rebellion, no matter who or what opposes. If the Union can not be preserved without _saltpeter_, then let enough of this article be employed to secure the result. And, if the disordered livers of political hypochondriacs can not be restored to healthy action without the use of _blue pills_, then let enough of these be given to work a cure. God has given the American people a goodly heritage--the fairest the world has ever seen. There is not a nation under all the heaven where the pulse does not beat quicker, and the hopes rise higher, and the thoughts grow larger, at the very mention of the American Republic. Never have the hopes of humanity so centered in any nation. Our country had come to be regarded as the cradle of liberty, the home of plenty, and the asylum for the poor and oppressed of other lands.