Where you in prospective see _peace_, glorious, coveted peace, and rest for our tired armies, and home and happiness and firesides and friends for our war-worn heroes, _I_ see only the _beginning of war_. If we should make overtures for “peace upon any terms,” then, I fear, would follow a code of terms to which no civilized nation could submit and present even an honorable existence among nations. God forbid that _I_ should ask the useless exposure of the life of _one_ man, the desolation of one more home; I never for a moment lose sight of the mothers and sisters, and white-haired fathers, and children moving quietly about, and dropping the unseen, silent tear in those far-away saddened homes, and I have too often wiped the gathering damp from pale, anxious brows, and caught from ashy, quivering lips the last faint whispers of home, not to realize the terrible cost of these separations; nor has morbid sympathy been all,--out amid the smoke and fire and thunder of our guns, with only the murky canopy above, and the bloody ground beneath, I have wrought day after day and night after night, my heart well-nigh to bursting with conflicting emotions, so sorry for the necessity, so glad for the _opportunity_ of ministering with my own hands and strength to the dying wants of the patriot martyrs who fell for their country and mine. If my poor life could have purchased theirs, how cheerfully and quickly would the exchange have been made; more than this I could not do, deeper than this I could not feel, and yet among it all it has never once been in my heart, or on my lips, to sue to our enemies for peace. First, they broke it without cause; last, they will not restore it without shame. True, we _may_ never find peace by _fighting_, certainly we never shall by _asking_. “Independence?” They always _had_ their independence till they madly threw it away; if there _be_ a chain on them to-day it is of their own riveting. I grant that our Government has made mistakes, sore ones, too, in some instances, but ours is a _human government_, and like _all_ human operations liable to mistakes; only the machinery and plans of Heaven move unerringly and we short-sighted mortals are, half our time, fain to complain of these. I would that so much of wisdom and foresight and strength and power fall to our rulers as would show them to-morrow the path to victory and peace, but we shall never strengthen their hands or incite their patriotism by deserting and upbraiding them. To _my_ unsophisticated mind, the Government of my country _is_ my country, and the _people_ of my country, the Government of my country as nearly as a representative system will allow. I have taught me to look upon our “Government” as the band which the people bind around the bundle of sticks to hold it firm, where every patriot hand must grasp the knot the tighter, and our “Constitution” as a