overwhelming avalanche of horrors which hung ready to be precipitated on our unhappy country. It is hardly within the limits of human depravity, that evils of such magnitude, attended by such world-wide results, should be attributable to the deliberate will and arbitrary action of even the worst members of the human family. For the credit of our common humanity, let it be admitted that the authors of the fatal movement did really believe In their avowed doctrine of peaceable secession, and that they could not have had the least idea of the immense proportions the civil war was destined to assume, nor of the extent of ruin and misery it would necessarily drag in its horrid train. And if the prominent leaders did not intend all the sad consequences of their wicked act of treason, still less can they be considered personally responsible for the fatal popular enthusiasm which has so thoroughly sustained them in their section. Though full of hate and animated by a spirit of infernal mischief, they had not the capacity to stir a nation so profoundly, except from the fact that they were dealing with minds already well prepared for their impassioned appeal, and with elements which had been wrought into discord by causes long preëxisting. In the midst of this stupendous conflict, individuals seem to be as insignificant and powerless to control it, as if they stood, awed and subdued by the warring elements of nature, and compelled to wait until these should expend their fury and of themselves subside. Thirty millions of people have been suddenly and unexpectedly divided, and the sundered parts have been thrown into fierce and deadly antagonism. Belligerent passions rage and boil among them with all the ungovernable power of the angry waves when the sea is lashed by the destructive tempest. The throes of the suffering nation are as terrible as those of the trembling earth, when, by some internal convulsion, its very foundations seem to be rocked on the fiery waves of the central abyss, and every living creature on its surface becomes agitated with profound dismay. States have been temporarily but rudely torn from their long and peaceful connections with sister States, and great rents in the political soil, filled with the bodies of slaughtered citizens, mark the lines of separation. Vast armies have been assembled and organized, and have met each other in the shock of battle, on fields made slippery with fraternal blood, where tens of thousands have fallen to rise no more--swept down by the relentless storm of iron hail with which brother has greeted brother in this most unholy war. The measured tramp of the armed hosts has shaken the continent; and the vengeful cries of the unnatural strife have disturbed the inmost peaceful recesses of its great central plains and mountains. From California to Texas; from Colorado to New Mexico; from Maine to New Orleans; from the great lakes to the coasts of the Carolinas; and along the measureless length of 'the