If peace had continued, and especially if no civil war had occurred to desolate our country, the labors of the population would have been directed chiefly to the increase of wealth, and to the improvement which always accompanies material prosperity. It would be a monstrous error to say that the interruption of these occupations has not been a calamity of the most serious character. Yet is it not altogether unmixed with good. Indeed, it is by no means certain that, in the circumstances which gave rise to the war, there was not an actual necessity, of a moral nature, which made it on the whole advantageous to arouse the nation to this gigantic strife, and thus to exchange its ordinary struggle for wealth into a combat for a momentous principle. Is it questionable whether, in every case, the establishment of such a principle is not the most important of all objects, and whether every other pursuit and occupation ought not to be made secondary to it? In the sacrifices and sufferings which a nation undergoes for the sake of asserting an important moral or political truth, there is always a wholesome virtue that in some measure redeems the brutality and violence which are the inseparable accompaniments of all wars, and which peculiarly characterize the history of civil wars, in every age and country. It is not merely the elevated and unselfish sentiment of patriotism, as known in former ages, and expressed in the noble sentiment, _dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_, which, engenders lofty impulses and nourishes the rugged virtues of the soldier in the heart; but the still higher sentiment of love for humanity and universal freedom--a sentiment wholly unknown in what are called the heroic ages--sanctifies the labors, the wounds, and the glorious death of the martyrs who struggle and fall in such a contest. Men have often fought and willingly died in the cause of their country, regardless of the merits of the controversy between the opposing parties. There is a certain manliness and devotion to others in this species of patriotism, which commands respect and admiration; and this feeling of approbation rises still higher when the cause of the nation is undeniably just, and the self-sacrificing patriot is giving his life for the purchase of liberty to his country. But the highest and noblest of all exhibitions is that in which the sacrifice is made for the good of the race--for principles in which all men are alike interested, and in which the martyr can claim no peculiar advantage to himself or to his own branch of the human family. The nation which accepts war for such a cause, and wages it with all her means and energies, exhibits a moral grandeur which, in spite of misfortune, has a saving power, capable of overcoming and compensating all calamities, of whatever nature and extent. That nation cannot be overthrown--not unless the laws of the Most High himself can be subverted, and the right be made permanently to succumb to the wrong.