It is, as a rule, futile to preach predestination to people who are not in the four hundred, but a general movement for the dissemination of knowledge is effective in tearing away ignorance, as the rich soil of Iowa is ripped up the back with a gang plow. With a due allowance of school-houses in the south forty years ago, the slaveholders' rebellion would have been impossible, just as in the prosperous, progressive American republic of to-day with ten million depositors in her banks and twenty million children in her schools, a successful assault on intelligence and prosperity would be impossible. Ignorance, as we have stated, fluttered recklessly near the scorchings of the bonfire. Whereupon knowledge achieved a popularity unprecedented since our first ancestress risked for its acquisition the fairest prospects of her distant and inconceivably multitudinous posterity. During ten years next succeeding the war, its loyal survivors were habitually called, half in affection, half in honor: "Our Boys in Blue." Even those who had hated their cause and mourned their success conceded the fitness of a sobriquet which exalted their uniform to the dignity of a moral attribute, and tinged their classification with the hue of their trousers. It was Plato who said: "The brave shall be crowned. He shall wed the fair. He shall be honored at the sacrifice and the banquet." This was the era of the wedding, the barbecue, the "present arms" to a phalanx of angels--as was eminently fitting. The women of '61 were not the wailing watchers and tearful lint-scrapers of a too current tradition. They were soulful, heart-strong heroines, the swordless soldiers of the Union. Lint-scraping and bandage winding were minor episodes. Their work was many sided as a prism, with every angle reflecting a radiant intensity. And all the ladders of grace that led from bloodiest battle-fields straight to the bending heavens, were built up, round by round, from the piety and devotion of intrepid womanhood. The Boys in Blue were rapidly and happily and most appropriately mated to the noble girls they left behind them. One of Napoleon's marshals exclaimed when dying: "I have dreamed a beautiful dream." To the Boy in Blue, suffused with blushes as the compliments rained on him, both war and peace were chrysanthemum visions, soft, rosy and spicy. The compliments were well earned and welcome; welcome and wholesome as a thoughtful surgeon's timely prescription in the cold drizzle of a night march, when he proffered his flask with: "Gentlemen, you need a tonic; leave a drop for me!" Even the chastened copperhead hissed no expostulation; he simply folded his Nessus shirt around him and lay down in baffled schemes, his only punishment being an enforced allegiance to the proudest flag and grandest country the world has ever seen.