Yet we counsel all who would be well-informed in literature--as well as the far greater number of those who read only for entertainment, to get this work. It is exciting--full of strange, quaint picturing of the Middle Ages, has vivid characters, and is full of life. Among the series of books with fewer faults, but, alas! with far fewer excellencies, which are daily printed, there is, after all, seldom one so well worth reading as _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_. EDITOR'S TABLE. At last we are wide awake. At last the nation has found out its strength, and determined, despite doughface objections and impediments to every proposal of every kind, to push the war with energy, so that the foe _shall_ be overwhelmed. Six hundred thousand men, as we write, will soon swell the ranks of the Federal army, and if six hundred thousand more are needed they can be had. For the North is arming in real earnest, thank God! and when it rises in _all_ its force, who shall withstand it? It is a thing to remember with pride, that the proclamation calling for the second three hundred thousand by draft, was received with the same joy as though we had heard of a great victory. Government has not gone to work one day too soon. From a rebellion, the present cause of strife has at length assumed the proportion of equal war. The South has cast its _whole_ population, all its means, all its energy, heart and soul, life and future, on one desperate game; while we with every advantage have let out our strength little by little, so as to hurt the enemy as little as possible. Doughface democracy among us has squalled as if receiving deadly wounds at every proposal to crush or injure the foe. It opposed, heart and soul, the early On to Richmond movement, when the Republicans clamored for an overwhelming army, a grand rally, and a bold push. It rejoiced at heart over Bull Run--for the South was saved for a time. It upheld the wounded snake, 'anaconda' system, it opposed the using of contrabands in any way, it urged, heart and soul, the protection of the property of rebels, it warred on confiscation in any form, it was ready with a negative to every proposition to energetically push the war, and finally its press is now opposing the settling our soldiers on the cotton-lands of the South. Thus far the slow course of this war of ten millions against twenty millions is the history of the action of falsehood and treason benumbing the majority. They have lied against us, and against millions, that the negro was all we cared for, though it was the WHITE MAN, far, far above the black for whom we spoke and cared, or how else could that _free_ labor in which the black is but a small unit have been our principal hope and thought?