and discourage the insurrection. We failed to make that exhibition, and so the war has been protracted into its third year, through the encouragement and aid the insurrection has received from the fears or the listlessness of portions of our own people, and the influences of the enemies of the Republic and of human freedom throughout the world. It was doubtless ordained that it should be so, and therefore it may be believed that it was best that it should be so, although we may be allowed to indulge our sorrows over the augmented sum of miseries which the war has inflicted upon the land.

I say it is perhaps best, because I think this ought to be the last insurrection in the United States the last effort ever made to dissolve the Union. The more suffering that attends this attempt, the less likely it is to be repeated.

But we have reached, I think, the culminating point at last; we have ascertained the amount of sacrifice which is necessary to save the Union, and the country is prepared to make it. The force of secession is exhausted. There are no more states to go into the insurrection. The insurrectionary states have no more soldiers to bring into the conflict. On the other hand, in the loyal states the plow has twice passed through the ground, and each time it has yielded the necessary harvest of defenders of the Union. The subsoil is deep, and is as rich in the elements of military strength and virtue as that which has already been twice furrowed. It is for the disloyal citizens to decide whether they will give up the contest now or abide a further and more conclusive trial.

Vicksburg fell on the fourth of July, and Port Hudson, I do not doubt, will fall before the fourth of August. When both have fallen, the United States are the masters of the Mississippi. The power that navigates the Mississippi dominates in North America, and makes a division of the United States of America impossible. Then I think that Rosecrans either has by this time, or soon will have, occupied the mountain passes of East Tennessee; and thus, by the two successes, the new slave Confederation becomes divided into four separate, disconnected territories. What kind of a Confederation will that be? a chain broken into four fragments; and this is only the beginning. Texas, west of the Mississippi, detached from the Confederation by the Mississippi; and territories east of the Alleghany Mountains, separated from the Gulf States by the

Federal occupation of East Tennessee, will be followed by new and inevitable cases of fracture.

You have already seen Missouri detach herself from the Confederacy. Next you will see Arkansas come into Congress, as you have already seen Louisiana come there. On this side of the Mississippi look sharply at the Old North State, and you will see her preparing to return into the Union. A strange kind of Confederate State will be seen existing between what remains to the insurgents of Virginia and South Carolina. Two slices of secession bread made into a sandwich by the intervening slice of North Carolina ham, with its copious condiment of Union mustard. My friends, we have seen a painful sight. We have seen thirteen stars of this glorious constellation shoot in blood and fire from their spheres. We are now to see a phenomenon that will compensate us for all the pain the former spectacle has given us.

We are to see each one of those stars coming back from its wandering through a chaos of consuming anarchy, and take its place in the firmament, to fall from thence, I trust, no more for ever. I am sure of this, because even in the darkest night of our troubles, I have known two things — first, that these stars could not be altogether extinguished, and, second, that the attraction which brought them originally together, however weakened, cannot be utterly broken. Do not go away with the impression that all these things are to come to pass without further performance of duty, and further sacrifice. The Union is to be saved after all only by human efforts, by the efforts of the people. These efforts are to be made in two forms you must vote for the Union through all discouragements and alarms and complaints, whether those in whom you have reposed confidence are wise or unwise, competent or incompetent, successful or unsuccessful; and yet you must fight for the Union, never retreating or giving ground before the enemy.

You must be prepared to do more. You must maintain your ground here in this capital. When the rebellion ceases, let it find us here, to celebrate the salvation of our country. If the capital must fall before it can be saved, which I have always thought unnecessary, and which now seems impossible, even in that case, let us be buried amid its ruins. For myself, this is my resolution. If the people of the United States have virtue enough to save the Union, I shall have their virtue. If they have not, then it shall be my reward that my virtue excelled that of my countrymen.

If I fall here, let no kinsman or friend remove my dust to a more hospitable grave. Let it be buried under the pavements of the Avenue, and let the chariot wheels of those who have destroyed the liberties of my country rattle over my bones until a more heroic and worthy generation shall recall that country to life, liberty, and independence. As this shall be my only reward, living or dying, for whatever I may be able to do for the deliverance of my country from danger, so, on the other hand, that country may visit me with whatever censure or reproach for shortcomings may seem. to it just, but the world shall never hear a word of complaint issue from my lips.

This is my resolution. Now, fellow citizens, for yours. What should that be? That resolution must be that you will not wait for draft or conscription. Ask not whether the enemy is near, or whether he is far off. Ask only, is there still an enemy in arms against the United States a domestic one or a foreign one? array yourselves to meet that enemy. Thus, when this insurgent enemy renews the desolation of your country, or a foreign enemy proposes to intervene, your answer for both is ready. I will write it down and deliver it for you, as heretofore. Do you only stand ready to maintain it, and if I can do more service in the ranks than I can in being your organ, I will enroll myself with you. The flag of the Union must wave, not only in the capital and in the free states, so-called, and on the Mississippi, but must go through the Union until not one disloyal citizen remains in arms to oppose it.

SPEECH AT GETTYSBURG.

November 18, 1863.

In the afternoon of the 18th of November, 1863, the President and the distinguished personages accompanying him arrived at Gettysburg, to attend the consecration of the National Cemetery. In the course of the evening, the President and Secretary of State were serenaded, and the following remarks were made by Mr. Seward in response to the call :

FELLOW-CITIZENS: I am now sixty years old and upward; I have been in public life, practically, forty years of that time, and yet this is the first time that ever any people or community so near to the border of Maryland was found willing to listen to my voice; and the

reason was that I saw, forty years ago, that slavery was opening before this people a graveyard that was to be filled with brothers falling in mutual political combat. I knew that the cause that was hurrying the Union into this dreadful strife was slavery; and when during all the intervening period I elevated my voice, it was to warn the people to remove that cause while they could by constitutional means, and so avert the catastrophe of civil war which has fallen upon the nation. I am thankful that you are willing to hear me at last. I thank my God that I believe this strife is going to end in the removal of that evil which ought to have been removed by deliberate councils and peaceful means. I thank my God for the hope that this is the last fratricidal war which will fall upon the country which is vouchsafed to us by Heaven, the richest, the broadest, the most beautiful, the most magnificent, and capable of a great destiny, that has ever been given to any part of the human race. And I thank Him for the hope that when that cause is removed, simply by the operation of abolishing it, as the origin and agent of the treason that is without justification and without parallel, we shall thenceforth be united, be only one country, having only one hope, one ambition, and one destiny. To-morrow, at least, we shall feel that we are not enemies, but that we are friends and brothers, that this Union is a reality, and we shall mourn together for the evil wrought by this rebellion. We are now near the graves of the misguided, whom we have consigned to their last resting-place, with pity for their errors, and with the same heart full of grief with which we mourn over a brother by whose hand, raised in defence of his government, that misguided brother perished.

When we part to-morrow night, let us remember that we owe it to our country and to mankind that this war shall have for its conclusion the establishing of the principle of democratic government,the simple principle that whatever party, whatever portion of the community prevails by constitutional suffrage in an election, that party is to be respected and maintained in power until it shall give place, on another trial and another verdict, to a different portion of the people. If you do not do this, you are drifting at once and irresistibly to the very verge of universal, cheerless, and hopeless anarchy. But with that principle this government of ours - the purest, the best, the wisest, and the happiest in the world — must be, and, so far as we are concerned, practically will be, immortal.

THE ALLIES OF TREASON.

THE FALL OF ATLANTA.

Auburn, September 3, 1864.1

MY DEAR FRIENDS: It is so that I like to see you come marching to the time of national airs, under the folds of the old national flag. I thank you for this hospitable and patriotic welcome. It proves that though you deal rigorously with your public servants, exacting reasons for their policy, energy in their conduct of affairs, and explanations for failures and disappointments in their administration, yet you are, nevertheless, just, because you willingly allow them to rejoice with you, when you have successes, victories, and triumphs to celebrate.

The news that brings us together is authentic. Here is a telegram which I received this morning from the Secretary of War: “Van Duzer reports that Sherman's advance entered Atlanta about noon to-day. Particulars not yet received. Edwin M. Stanton."

Now this news comes in a good shape. It is pleasant to have a grand result at the first, and it protracts the interest of the thing to have particulars coming in afterward.

This victory comes in the right connection. It falls in with the echoes of the capture of Forts Gaines and Morgan, which I understand to be the particulars of Farragut's glorious naval battle in the bay of Mobile, a battle equaled by no other in American history, but the naval achievements of the same veteran admiral at New Orleans and Port Hudson, and all these have no parallel in naval warfare, but the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar. I know the Admiral well, and I confess that we all can't be Farraguts. Indeed, very few of us can, But we may take this comfort to ourselves, that as a whole people, we can appreciate the veterans. also appreciate Sherman, who has performed the most successful and splendid march through a mountainous and hostile country recorded in modern history, and in doing this we show ourselves inferior in virtue to no other nation.

We can

1 The Presidential canvass had just begun, President Lincoln and Gen. McClellan being the candidates.