Well, before long the soldiers will come back, such as shall ever come--the regulars and volunteers, the husbands of the women whom your charity fed last winter, housed and clad and warmed. They will come back. Come, New England, with your posterity of States, go forth to meet your sons returning all "covered with imperishable honors." Come, men, to meet your fathers, brothers. Come, women, to your husbands and your lovers; come. But what! is that the body of men who a year or two ago went forth, so full of valor and of rum? Are these rags the imperishable honors that cover them? Here is not half the whole. Where is the wealth they hoped from the spoil of churches? But the men--"Where is my husband?" says one; "And my son?" says another. "They fell at Jalapa, one, and one at Cerro Gordo; but they fell covered with imperishable honor, for 'twas a famous victory." "Where is my lover?" screams a woman whom anguish makes respectable spite of her filth and ignorance;--"And our father, where is he?" scream a troop of half-starved children, staring through their dirt and rags. "One died of the vomit at Vera Cruz. Your father, little ones, we scourged the naked man to death at Mixcoac." But that troop which is left, who are in the arms of wife and child, they are the best sermon against war; this has lost an arm and that a leg; half are maimed in battle, or sickened with the fever; all polluted with the drunkenness, idleness, debauchery, lust, and murder of a camp. Strip off this man's coat, and count the stripes welted into his flesh, stripes laid on by demagogues that love the people, "the dear people!" See how affectionately the war-makers branded the "dear soldiers" with a letter D, with a red-hot iron, in the cheek. The flesh will quiver as the irons burn; no matter: it is only for love of the people that all this is done, and we are all of us covered with imperishable honors! D stands for deserter,--aye, and for demagogue--yes, and for demon too. Many a man shall come home with but half of himself, half his body, less than half his soul. "Alas, the mother that him bare, If she could stand in presence there, In that wan cheek and wasted air, She would not know her child." "Better," you say, "for us better, and for themselves better by far, if they had left that remnant of a body in the common ditch where the soldier finds his 'bed of honor;' better have fed therewith the vultures of a foreign soil, than thus come back." No, better come back, and live here, mutilated, scourged, branded, a cripple, a pauper, a drunkard, and a felon; better darken the windows of the jail and blot the gallows with unusual shame, to teach us all that such is war, and such the results of every "famous victory," such the imperishable honors that it brings, and how the war-makers love the men they rule!