indifference, or selfish haste; but if there is one truth truer than another, it is that no man or nation ever neglected a duty that was not sooner or later laid upon them in a heavier form, to be done at a dearer rate. Neither man nor nation can find rest short of their highest convictions. This is something that altogether transcends any partisan politics. It is of comparatively little consequence to us whether Congress or the President carry the day, provided only that America triumph. That is, after all, the real question. On which side is the future of the country,--the future that we cannot escape if we would, but which our action may embarrass and retard? If we had looked upon the war as a mere trial of physical strength between two rival sections of the country, we should have been the first to oppose it, as a wicked waste of treasure and blood. But it was something much deeper than this, and so the people of the North instinctively recognized it to be from the first,--instinctively, we say, and not deliberately at first; but before it was over, their understandings had grasped its true meaning, as an effort of the ideal America, which was to them half a dream and half a reality, to cast off an alien element. It was this ideal something, not the less strongly felt because vaguely defined, that made them eager, as only what is above sordid motives can, to sacrifice all that they had and all that they were rather than fail in its attainment. And it is to men not yet cooled from the white-heat of this passionate mood that Mr. Johnson comes with his paltry offer of "my policy," in exchange for the logical consequences of all this devotion and this sacrifice. What is any one man's policy, and especially any one weak man's policy, against the settled drift of a nation's conviction, conscience, and instinct? The American people had made up not only their minds, but their hearts, and no man who knows anything of human nature could doubt what their decision would be. They wanted only a sufficient obstacle to awaken them to a full consciousness of what was at stake, and that obstacle the obstinate vanity of the President and the blindness or resentment of his prime minister have supplied. They are fully resolved to have the great stake they played for and won, and that stake was the Americanization of all America, nothing more and nothing less. Mr. Johnson told us in New York, with so profound a misconception of the feeling of the Northern States as was only possible to a vulgar mind, and that mind a Southern one, that the South had set up slavery as its stake, and lost, and that now the North was in danger of losing the stake it had risked on reconstruction in the national debt. Mr. Johnson is still, it would seem, under that delusion which led the South into the war; namely, that it was that section of the country which was the chief element in its wealth and greatness. But no Northern man, who, so long as he lives, will be