It is not strange it has taken us three years to find who can fight among us. The Germans fought fifty years against religious despotism before they found Gustavus Adolphus to lead them to victory. The English fought ten years before Cromwell took command of his Ironsides. The French blundered ten years before the 'little corporal' led the army of the republic over the Alps to dethrone half the monarchs of Europe. The people had but one great general in the Revolutionary War. Until 1860 the aristocracy had furnished the only great American commander. But great generals have now appeared among the people; and if we fight stoutly and treat men fairly, our commander will appear when his army of veterans is ready. The aristocracy at first moved armies faster than the people, for the same reason that the Tartars, the Cossacks, the Arabs, the Indians, and all semi-barbarians move more rapidly in war than a civilized people. A semi-barbarous oligarchy fights because it loves war; a civilized people fights to _establish civilization and peace_. The Southern army carries little along, lives on the food and wears the dress of the semi-savage, and overruns vast spaces, leaving a smoking desolation and a ruined society. The Northern army moves slowly, because it carries American civilization in its knapsack and baggage wagons, organizes republican society as it goes, and prepares to hold for liberty all it has gained. The people's army has paved the way for liberty and a democratic order of society over two hundred thousand square miles, among four millions of people, in three years. New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Beaufort, Alexandria, every slave city in our possession, is being made over into a free city.