Can any one deny that the Federal Government was compelled to take up the gage of battle which the rebels had so vauntingly thrown down? Not merely the interests of civil authority and order, but the preponderance of freedom, and the claims of humanity on this continent, required the most determined resistance to be made, and forbade the possibility of quietly surrendering the destinies of the nation into the hands of the traitors who sought to destroy it, What a spectacle of imbecility and miserable failure in the hour of great peril would have been presented to the indignant world, if, in this great crisis, the national authorities had been so far beneath the occasion as to have declined the proffered contest and basely betrayed their trust, at the first demand of the seceding States! The everlasting scorn of mankind would have overwhelmed and blasted the dastard and degenerate race, who would thus have sacrificed the highest and most sacred interests of humanity. Rather than this, welcome the civil war, with all its sacrifices! Welcome privations, labors, taxes, wounds, death, and all the nameless horrors that swarm along the red path of civil strife! Thousands of precious lives and billions of treasure have already been expended, and yet no patriotic heart thinks of turning back from the battle field, until the Union established by our fathers shall be restored to its integrity. Compelled to admit the conclusions already stated, let us not do injustice even to the men who are prominent in this iniquitous rebellion. The most difficult of all moral problems is to determine how far individual agency can control social or political events, and what degree of responsibility attaches to those who have been apparently influential in producing disastrous results. An impartial study of history will serve to establish the truth that prominent men who, in any age, may seem to have produced great changes by their individual will, were merely the instruments of society by which irresistible tendencies were carried out to their necessary ends. The very conceptions of such men are the offspring of their times, and in order that they should have power to accomplish their designs, the great social forces of the community must be at their disposal, ready and inclined to perform the work. A great rock or a mighty glacier may be so balanced at the mountain top, that a small force--the sound of a trumpet, a mere breath of air--may dislodge it, and cause it to descend, carrying destruction into the valley. But the force of gravitation is necessary to bring it down and give it the impetus of ruin. So the might of a great people may be poised on some lofty pinnacle of human destiny; but unless there he involved in the existing sentiments and convictions, the situation and surroundings of that people, the elements of force and action, for good or evil, no individual agency and no combination of men can impart the power which they lack.