And after the slaughter of thousands in battle, and the death of as many more in hospitals, of fever, starvation and wounds, still was our hatred of the sin which caused them not deep enough. We talked of amnesty and non-humiliation, and God has permitted the sad cup to come to each lip in bitterness. Each one mourns to-day as if personally bereaved. The blackness of darkness is in our homes, and the whole nation mourns its first-born--its first-loved. May not--does not--a measure of responsibility rest upon us for this last sad event? Have we not been tolerant of the treason which has wrought this crime? Have we not been apologists for infamy under the name of different political opinions? Have we not spared when we should have punished--been merciful when mercy was but cruelty? We seem to have believed that because there were more serpents away from our homes, the few left here had no venom. We felt secure because the loyalists were more numerous than the traitors. But of the few who were here, and tolerated here, some plotted the escape of rebel prisoners, some the burning of our city, some the conflagration of New York, and some the murder of the Cabinet, while one has killed the good President. Had they all been driven out, or put under strict surveillance, there would have been none of these things from them. We have lost our President by tolerating traitors in our streets. Who was the assassin of the President? Not an armed rebel, clothed with belligerent rights; not a political refugee, who had skulked into our lines for rapine and for plunder; but the citizen of a free State, who could visit and send his cards to the Vice-President with a flippant familiarity, which his aristocratic slave-holding associates presume to use,--a man allowed to go about the streets of Washington, breathing treason and blaspheming God, without rebuke. He could command attention from proprietors of houses and saloons, from owners of blooded stock, from men who were called loyal, and the toleration of this killed our good President.