It is perfectly possible to be fully persuaded in one's own mind without the passionate desire to make converts that animates the born preacher, and any one may be excused from preaching when he recognizes the existence of a mental or moral color-blindness with which it is not worth while to argue. There is no umpire to decide which of the disputants is color-blind, and the discussion is apt to degenerate into a wearisome reiteration of points which neither party will concede. Now this matter of allegiance is just such a question. Open the October number of The Atlantic and read the sketch of General Thomas, whom many military men on the Southern side consider to have been the ablest of all the Federal generals. He was, as every one knows, a Virginian, and it seemed to us that his being a Virginian was remembered against him in the Federal councils. "His severance," says the writer in The Atlantic, "from family and State was a keen trial, but 'his duty was clear from the beginning.' To his vision there was but one country,--the United States of America. He had few or no friends at the North. Its political policy had not seemed to him to be wise. But he could serve under no flag except that which he had pledged his honor to uphold." Passing over the quiet assumption that the North was the United States of America, which sufficiently characterizes the view of the writer, let us turn to the contrast which would at once have suggested itself even if it had not been brought forward by the eulogist of Thomas. A greater than Thomas decided the question at the same time, and decided it the other way. To Lee's vision there was but one course open to a Virginian, and the pledge that he had given when Virginia was one of the United States of America had ceased to bind him when Virginia withdrew from the compact. His duty was clear from the hour when to remain in the army would have been to draw his sword against a people to whom he was "indissolubly bound." [Note: "I think it is not unsafe to assert that nowhere did the original spirit of State Sovereignty and allegiance to the State then survive in greater intensity and more unquestioning form than in Virginia--the 'Old Dominion'--the mother of States and of Presidents. "State pride, a sense of individuality, has immemorially entered more largely and more intensely into Virginia and Virginians than into any other section or community of the United States. Only in South Carolina and among Carolinians, on the trans-Atlantic continent, was a somewhat similar sense of locality and obligation of descent to be found. There was in it a flavour of the Hidalgo, or of the pride which the MacGregors and Campbells took in their clan and country. In other words, the Virginian and Carolinian had in the middle of the last century, not to any appreciable extent, undergone nationalization."--CHAS. FRANCIS ADAMS, Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity p. 137.