I believe that the foregoing, re-enforced by a glance over the chapter-titles, will give a reader the preconception which he ought to get from an introduction to a book which he is about to begin. In dealing with the causes and some of the more important consequences of the brothers' war my method is rationale rather than narrative. My first purpose is to indicate how everything happened according to laws that with cosmic force reared two great economic powers, divided the whole land into a vast host standing up for one of the two in the south, and a still larger host standing up for the other in the north, and how these same laws were most faithfully served by all the actors on each side. I try to set out and explain what are the principles of evolution and the ways of human action, and especially the commanding view-points, which must be rightly attended to in their supreme importance before the greater one of the two critical American eras can have its fit history. The man who writes it will be entirely free from the monomania and orgiastic fury of both fire-eater and root-and-branch abolitionist, from their excessively emotional assumptions, their explosive and exclamatory argumentation; he will have the industry, the undisturbed vision, and the perfect fairness of the foremost sociologists of our time; he will show how each side was right from first to last in upholding its own separate country,--all belonging to it, statesmen, agitators, demagogues, fanatical fire-eaters and abolitionists, generals and soldiers. He will show that such things which in expedience ought not to have been done were unavoidable, and therefore to be excused. He will show what erroneous judgments of each section should now be challenged and kept from working injury. Especially do I emphasize it, he will convince every average reader that north and south were equally conscientious, honest, heroic, and lovable from beginning to end. Such a history will be even greater than that by which Thucydides realized his soaring ambition to give the world an everlasting possession; and it will become the bible of America, treasured and loved alike by the people both north and south.