The duty of sustaining our government in the present contest, has taken the strongest hold upon the public mind in all the loyal States. The progress of the rebellion and the advance in preparations to put it down, serves to increase rather than diminish the sentiment, that, at all sacrifices, we must strangle and tread under foot this slimy, deadly-fanged serpent, hatched in the atmosphere of Southern skies. Such a monster would have been a marvel in any age and country, but could never have aroused so much righteous indignation and called forth more stern determination to destroy it, than in our period and nation. The masses at the South are too ignorant and demoralized, to see how hideous the New Confederacy appears at the North, where conscience, reason, patriotism, general intelligence, liberty and religion, enable all classes of society, all parties in politics, to discern, how mean, dishonest, hateful and traitorous, this usurped and despotic military power really is.
We think it can be fully demonstrated, that no more important enterprise than the complete and radical overthrow of the Secession scheme, was ever embarked in by men; that it overtops in value and immensity of interest at stake, the American Revolution. It is the perception of this importance, that has rallied all the sound elements of the nation to the rescue; that has quickened the pulse to the feeling of urgency in the case, and united, as it were in a moment, all patriots, however they may have been ranged in opposite parties.
Even at the South, the people cannot be forever deluded, the truth will force its way through the dense atmosphere of falsehood, and light will break out in the Egyptian darkness. History, no where records the sudden and total extinction of intelligence, moral sense, and mute, inglorious repose and abject submission, among a people, so well informed, as must be the case at the South, where churches are organized and ministers of the gospel are settled, and literary and general intelligence is diffused among many of the people. Prof. Lowe, alighting from his balloon in South Carolina, although he found many ready to shoot at him while in the air, and too fearful to aid him in securing his balloon, yet found a few intelligent and well disposed persons to protect him - so, we shall find, that virtue is not all dead in the South, and that a resurrection of patriotism will be witnessed, when we shall have hurled from their usurped places the ringleaders of this nefarious business, and wrested from them the power which they have obtained by fraud and violence.
We cannot pause a moment in this conflict, but must march on in solid column, and flank on all sides the territory where the flag of the nation has been stricken down. For God and for the country! For right and liberty! we fight, and the nation and the world will hail with delight the hour when the rebellion shall be crushed, and the guilty leaders and abettors suffer the condign punishment they deserve.
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