I am sure that it is high time that we of each section should school ourselves into impartially appreciating the civil leaders of the other side. The south has made more progress towards this than the north. Certain causes have operated to help her onward. One of these is that practically all of us recognize it is far better for the section that the union side won. Another is that the great mass have learned that slavery both effeminated and paralyzed the whites and was a smothering incubus upon our due social and material development. It is natural that although we give our pro-slavery political leaders and the confederate soldiers increasing love, we should more and more commend the pro-union and anti-slavery activity of the northern statesmen. Nothing like this has led the north to revise the reprobation which in the heat and passion of the conflict it bestowed upon the public men of the south. If I ever read a good word from a northern writer as to them, it is for something in their careers disconnected with the southern cause. Even Mr. Rhodes, the ablest and most impartial of northern historians of the times, finds in Calhoun only a closet spinner of utterly impractical theories. Further, I could hardly believe it when I read it--and it is hard for me to believe it yet--that, citing some flippant words of Parton in which a slander of contemporary politics is toothsomely repeated as his voucher, he flatly charges the lion-hearted knight of the south with playing the coward in the most heroic episode of his grand career. My faith is strong that this mode of treating the good and great southern leaders will soon go out of fashion. I am greatly in earnest to vindicate these leaders--especially Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. Much of the public life of each one was concerned with matters of national interest. To this I give special attention, for I want my northern readers to know what true Americans they all were. Without this they cannot have their full glory. And their justification is that of their people. Such effective leaders are always representative. It is a misnomer to call them leaders. They were really followers of their constituents who were struggling for the subsistence of themselves and their dear ones. During this time Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis, had they not labored in every way to protect this great cause--the cause of their own country--as they did, would have been as recreant as the confederate soldier, skulking away from the line defending home and fireside. When our country is in peril the unseen lords of its destiny do not take any one of us, from the greatest to the humblest, into their confidence as to the event. Every man of us must support in politics and on the field the cause of our people. If that must go down it will make defeat glorious to go down with it, as contentedly and bravely as did Demosthenes, Cicero, and Davis.