It was not any one nor all of these causes that moved the people. Each newspaper, Democratic or Republican, has selected some nail upon which it hangs the laurel wreath of victory, inscribed with its own puny text for which it has fought its little battle, and each newspaper of the Republican press has covered, with the tattered garments of defeat, its little text wherein it had proclaimed that the Republican party would be victorious, and labeled its tattered garment of lack of judgment with some phrase like, “Disloyalty of Platt,” “Incapacity of Carter,” “Want of Organization,” “Lack of Popularity and Magnetism of our Candidate,” “The Voters didn’t come out.” Had the press no part of its own reputation at stake, they would have searched and delved into the bosoms of men; yes, neither space nor distance, time nor expense, would have been spared by the magnates of the newspaper world to ascertain the true cause. But in ascertaining that true cause, it would have been necessary, in announcing the same, to stultify themselves in what they had been predicting, proclaiming, foretelling, and advising, for months and years. The truth is in the air; was in the air before the election. ’Twas breathed; it was thought; yea, better, it was _felt_, by the great throbbing, aching heart of the men and women of the Union. From the hovel to the palace, the insidious, poisonous vapor of a supposed affected, sham aristocracy, with the noxious slime of a half-proclaimed doctrine of the inequality of man and woman, by reason of non-possession of wealth, had crept. The air of freedom was polluted by the emanations arising from the imported English decaying corpse of aristocracy. It was everywhere. In blindness and self-delusion, the press made its battle; in the very air of it, howling against Protection and for Protection, against Force Bill and for Force Bill, while the wretched, cankerous ulcer was eating into the pride of every free-born man and woman in the land. The very silence of the people, the general apathy, was evidence of but one of the symptoms of the insidious disease with which the body politic was being consumed. A scene that has been described in Washington just prior to the late Civil War best illustrates the condition of the people. The city of Washington was filled with silent, sullen, suspicious men. A sombre air pervaded the Capital. South Carolina had seceded; the Union was disintegrating. All that had been, was being forgotten. Old ties were breaking; old friendships becoming strange. Each man viewed his neighbor and his friend of yesterday, with a doubt in his mind as to whether they would fight side by side, or beat each other’s throats to-morrow. Men paced their rooms in the various hotels, anxious and careworn, sleepless and fearful. Yet, the surface was still, a dangerous state of general apathy obtained, if silence and murmuring, without action, can be called apathy.