wonderful foresight, "These speeches will avail but little; _slavery will go down in blood."_ That it has gone down even at the cost of so much blood and treasure is to-day as much a matter for congratulation in the South as it is in the North. My first glimpse of the long predicted conflict was the sight of the Seventh Regiment,--composed of the flower of New York,--swinging down Broadway in April, 1861, on its way to the protection of Washington,--amid the thundering cheers of the bystanders. Before long I offered my services to the "Christian commission" which had been organized by that noble and godly minded patriot, George H. Stuart, of Philadelphia, and I went on to Washington to preach to our soldiers. I found Washington a huge military encampment; the hills around were white with tents, and Pennsylvania Avenue was filled almost every day with troops of horsemen, or with trains of artillery. While I was in Washington I lodged with my beloved college professor, that eminent Christian philosopher, Joseph Henry,--in the Smithsonian Institution, of which he was the head. One night, after I had been out addressing our boys in blue at one of the camps, and had retired for the night, Professor Henry came into my room and, sitting down by my bed, discussed the aspects of the struggle. His mental eye was as sharp in reading the signs of the times as it had been when at Albany, thirty years before, he made his splendid discovery in electro-magnetism. He said to me: "This war may last several years, but it can have only one result, for it is simply a question of dynamics. The stronger force must pulverize the weaker one, and the North will win the day. When the war is over, the country will not be what it was before; the triumph of the union will leave us a prodigiously centralized government, and the old Calhoun theory of 'State rights' will be dead. We shall have an inflated currency--an enormous debt with a host of tax-gatherers, and huge pension rolls. What is most needed now is wise statesmanship, and the first quality of a statesman is _prescience_. In my position here, as head of the Smithsonian, I cannot be a partisan! I did not vote the Republican ticket, but I am confident that by a long way the most far-seeing head in this land is on the shoulders of that awkward rail-splitter from Illinois." Every syllable of Professor Henry's prognostication proved true, and nothing more true than his estimate of Lincoln at a time when there was too much disposition to distrust him.