The Continental Monthly, Vol I, Issue I, January 1862, page 179 by Various Authors
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nd everything to superfluity--but oh, give us victory and power!' Out of such will as this there come the greatest of men--giants of a fearfully glorious future. When we look around and see this red-hot iron determination to see all through to the victorious end, we may well feel assured that the day of great ideas and of great men is not far off.
It is superb for a stranger to see how the spirit of the Revolution still lives in New England, and is voiced and acted by men bearing Revolutionary names--it is magnificent to behold the stream, grown to a thunder-torrent, roaring and foaming over the broad West. Hurrah! it still lives--that old spirit of freedom, its fires are all aflame, and it shall not again smoulder until the whole world has seen, as it did before, that it is the light of the world, and the pillar guiding as of old to the promised land.
If 1861 had brought nothing else to pass it would be supremely great in this, that amid toil and trial, foes within and without, it has seen the American people determine that Slavery, the worm which gnawed the core of its tree of life, shall be plucked out. Out it shall go, that is settled. We have fought the foe too long with kid gloves, but now puss will lay aside her mittens and catch the Southern rats in earnest. It is the negro who sustains the South; the negro who maintains its army, feeds it, digs its trenches, squires its precious chivalry, and is thereby forced most unnaturally to rivet his own chains. There shall be an end to this, and our administration is yielding to this inevitable necessity. Here again the great year has worked a wonder, since in so short a space it has made such an advance in discovering a basis by which all Union men may conscientiously unite in freeing the black. There have been hitherto two steps made towards the solution. The first was that of the old Abolition movement, which saw only the suffering of the slave and cried aloud for his freedom, reckless of all results. It was humane; but even huma