When I think of all the grace, loveliness, and generosity of the many Southern women I have known and loved; when I recall the admirable qualities which distinguished them, the grace of manner, the social tact and address, the intellectual sprightliness, the openness and hospitality of soul, the kindliness and sympathy of heart, the Christian gentleness and charity; I can but say to my Northern sisters, These deluded women of the South would, in themselves, be worthy of your esteem and love, could the demon of secession and slavery once be exorcised. And I believe that when it is, and the poor, rent South sits clothed and in her right mind, subdued through sheer exhaustion of strength, and so made fit for the healthy recuperation that is one day to begin, the cause of our beloved country, and of humanity through this country, will have no more generous or loving supporters, ay, none so enthusiastic and devoted as they. I glory in the anticipation of the time when the ardent, impulsive, demonstrative South shall even lead the colder North in the manifestation of a genuine patriotism, worthy of the land and nation that calls it forth. We shall then have gained _a country_, indeed, instead of being, as heretofore, several sections of a country. The consistent moulding of society in the spirit of our political ideas is essential to securing us the respect of the world, and to vindicating the principles, themselves, on which having built, they are our sole claim to such honor and respect. As long as we fail so to do, we may be the wonder, and we are likely to be the jest of the onlooking world, but we never can be what we ought to be, its admired and beloved model. It seems to me there is less danger now than formerly of our failure in this important respect. The dangers, the expenses, the burdens, and losses of this fearful civil war will surely create in the hearts of the people everywhere, North and South, a revivified if not a new-born love for, and appreciation of, republican principles, and will teach them where the most insidious danger to them lies; not from open foes, foreign or domestic; not from anything inherent in those free principles; but from a cause exceedingly paradoxical: a democratic people leaving to a party, to a section, the Government which should be their very own; the virtue and intelligence of the nation absenting themselves from the national councils, thus making way for corruption and fraud to enter in an overwhelming flood; one half of the nation rocking its conscience to sleep with the false lullaby of commercial greatness and material prosperity, and the other, left to do the governing, with seemingly no conscience at all, going to work with satanic directness and acuteness, to undermine the principles thus left without a guardian, and to inject the black blood of slavery into the veins of the body politic, till the name _democracy_ became a misnomer the most wretched, a sarcasm the most touching.