All this occurred more than forty-five years ago. The war which gave birth to such fury is a matter of history now, not of controversy. It is not worth while nearly half a century later to inquire too curiously into the rights and wrongs, or into the responsibilities involved in such things. But it is perhaps of human advantage, or at the least of curious historic interest, to note that all these things were done in professed service to that personal liberty which free government among men is instituted to secure. From the point of view of the angels and other superior intelligences there could be nothing more gruesomely ludicrous than the attitude and condition of the American people on both sides of the war-drawn lines at that period. On both sides men professed and honestly believed that their supreme concern was for the maintenance--in Mr. Lincoln's phrase--of a "government of the people, by the people and for the people." Yet on each side there existed, and men consented to it, a military despotism as arbitrary, as unreasoning, and as tyrannical as that of Russia itself. On either side no man could travel without permission of some provost authority which there was nowhere any power to question or any court to curb. On either side that military power which our Constitution requires to be always subordinate to the civil arm, had laid its iron hand without even the disguise of a velvet glove upon the fate and fortune and life of every citizen of a land supposed to be the freest on earth. In New York men could be butchered in their homes and thrown out of high windows without so much as the order of a sheriff in justification. In Richmond Winder's men made practical prisoners of all soldiers and citizens who undertook to traverse the streets upon however laudable an occasion. It is always thus in war. No sooner is the military power invoked in aid of civil authority than it demands and enforces the abdication of all civil authority in so far as that authority may interfere in the slightest degree with its arbitrary execution of its own irresponsible will. So during this Confederate war of ours we see a great people, free by inheritance, free by tradition, and clamorously free by every conceivable act of self assertion throughout generations of history, suddenly and willingly surrendering to military despotism all that they had ever dreamed of, or clamored for, or fought for of personal right and immunity, and doing all this in the name and in behalf of liberty.