It is superb for a stranger to see how the spirit of the Revolution still lives in New England, and is voiced and acted by men bearing Revolutionary names--it is magnificent to behold the stream, grown to a thunder-torrent, roaring and foaming over the broad West. Hurrah! it still lives--that old spirit of freedom, its fires are all aflame, and it shall not again smoulder until the whole world has seen, as it did before, that it is the light of the world, and the pillar guiding as of old to the promised land. If 1861 had brought nothing else to pass it would be supremely great in this, that amid toil and trial, foes within and without, it has seen the American people determine that _Slavery_, the worm which gnawed the core of its tree of life, shall be plucked out. _Out it shall go_, that is settled. We have fought the foe too long with kid gloves, but now puss will lay aside her mittens and catch the Southern rats in earnest. It is the negro who sustains the South; the negro who maintains its army, feeds it, digs its trenches, squires its precious chivalry, and is thereby forced most unnaturally to rivet his own chains. There shall be an end to this, and our administration is yielding to this inevitable necessity. Here again the great year has worked a wonder, since in so short a space it has made such an advance in discovering a basis by which all Union men may conscientiously unite in freeing the black. There have been hitherto two steps made towards the solution. The first was that of the old Abolition movement, which saw only the suffering of the slave and cried aloud for his freedom, reckless of all results. It was humane; but even humanity is not always worldly wise, and it did unquestionably for twenty years defeat its own aim in the Border States. But it _worked_ most unflinchingly. Then came HELPER, who saw that the poor white man of the South was being degraded below the negro, and that industry and capital were fearfully checked by slavery. In his well-known work he pointed out, by calm and dispassionate facts and figures, that the land south of 'Mason and Dixon's' was being sacrificed most wastefully, and the majority of its white inhabitants kept in incredible ignorance, meanness, and poverty, simply that a few privileged families might remain 'first and foremost.' These opinions were most clearly sustained, and the country was amazed. People began to ask if it was quite right, after all, to suffer this slavery to grow and grow, when it was manifestly reacting on the poor white man, and literally sinking him _below the level of the black_. This was the second movement on the slave question, and its effect was startling.