Now, the very head and front, the bone and marrow of Southern politics for more than three decades, has been--slavery, and plans for its aggrandizement and perpetuation. _That_ has been the ulterior object of all the past vociferations about _State rights_ and _Southern rights_. Slavery is country, practically, with them, and as it lay at the root of their society, and its check or its extinction would, in their false view, overturn society itself, it was easy for the scheming, cunning leaders of the slave faction to adroitly transfer this enthusiasm, and to raise the watchword, which never yet among any people has been raised in vain, _Your homes and firesides_! When ever did women hear that cry unmoved? When _country_, that grand idea and object of human hope, pride, and affection, had degenerated into a section; and when a false and miserable _institution_, from its very nature terribly intimate with the life of society, became the most substantial feature of that section; what wonder if the war has at last, whatever it might have been at first, come to the complexion of a contest for home and fireside with the masses of the people, with the majority of the Southern women? The magnificent dreams and projects, too, of a great slave empire, that should swallow up territory after territory, and astonish the world with its wealth, power, and splendor, which were fused into life in the brains of the great apostles of slavery and secession, had their influence on minds which, like the minds of the Southern women, have a natural, innate love for the gorgeous, the splendid, the profuse, and showy; minds ambitious of, and accustomed to, rule, and impatient of control; minds already glazed over with the influence of the lying assertion, proved to their uncritical, passionate judgment by all the sophistical arguments of which their religious and political guides were capable, that slavery is the very best possible condition for the black man, and the relation of master the only true and natural one for the white. I say, I do not wonder at the Southern women so much. I pity them infinitely. Just think what they have been educated to believe, and then say if there is not something sadly splendid in the very spirit of endurance, of defiance, of sacrifice, however wrong and mistaken, they have shown. I pity them profoundly, for they are drinking to the lees the cup of suffering, of deprivation, of humiliation, of bitter loss, and stern retribution. And the end is not yet. Deeper chagrin and humiliation must be theirs; more loss, more devastation, more death, and ruin, before their proud hopes and visions are utterly crushed out of life. Oh, are _they_ not being educated, too, as well as we of the North?