Peace.
The blessings of a peace which is honorably gained and established on permanent foundations can only be appreciated by a people who have borne the trials and tribulations necessary to its accomplishment.
It is like health and all other blessings, only to be adequately estimated by those who have been deprived of it. But, like them also, to be worth anything, and to impart any solid satisfaction and comfort, it must be the result of no shallow and superficial treatment, such as affects only the surface, and leaves the source of disease untouched and ready to manifest itself again upon the slightest irritation.
Peace, to yield permanent happiness and security, must be honorably achieved — worked out by a persevering and triumphant demonstraton of our ability to maintain our independence, even though it cost a longer war than that of the
American Revolution.
Such a peace will be sweet and glorious indeed, and all the more sweet and glorious that it has been accomplished by our own unaided valor and self-denial.
It may well animate and encourage the hearts of all those now toiling and battling for the cause of independence, to look forward to such a result of their labors.
As the Israelites solaced their pilgrimage through the desert with the thoughts of the sweet fields of
Canaan beyond the swelling flood of
Jordan, and as the
Christian host, struggling amid the pitfalls and persecutions of a hostile world, look forward to ‘"that rest which remaineth to the people of God,"’ so may the great, patriotic souls of this war for all that man holds dear, refresh themselves amid their mighty toils and solicitudes by enticipations of a peace which they can only gain by their own virtue and fortitude, and which though long delayed, will come at last if they are faithful to the end. The same Divine hand which guided the children of Israel through the desert, has over and over again manifest in our behalf, and if we do not prove, faithless in the midst of in despite of mer to wander reach.
ple, separated forever from the incongruous and disturbing elements of Northern society, and from the tyrannical race who, because we refused to remain forever howers of wood and drawers of water for Yankee task-masters, are trying to cut our throats.
We shall be delivered from all future association in every shape and form, with the rascally, hypocritical, swindling, humbagging, wooden nutmeg making sons of the Pilgrims.
We shall have our own laws, literature, civilization, and sit under our own vine and fig tree with none to molest us or make us afraid.
And not the least gratifying result of peace will be its effects upon the
Yankee nation, whom it will leave high and dry, without a dime in its pocket or a friend on the face of the earth.
It will be at once the most impoverished and despised of nations.
It will be shut up to the cultivation of cod-fish and potatoes, and the contemplation of its own miraculous imbecility.
Its people will spend their days in cheating one another, and their nights in remose, that, in making war upon the
South, they ‘"cast away a pearl richer than all their tribe."’
