the cold and shy regards that are cast upon our troops, the gloom, the
sullen demeanor, the declared or scarcely hidden sympathy with
rebellion, which are so frequent here. It is a strange thing in human
life, that the greatest errors both of men and women often spring from
their sweetest and most generous qualities; and so, undoubtedly,
thousands of warm-hearted, sympathetic, and impulsive persons have
joined the Rebels, not from any real zeal for the cause, but because,
between two conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily
lay nearest the heart. There never existed any other Government against
which treason was so easy, and could defend itself by such plausible
arguments as against that of the United States. The anomaly of two
allegiances (of which that of the State comes nearest home to a man's
feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the General
Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law, and has no
symbol but a flag) is exceedingly mischievous in this point of view;
for it has converted crowds of honest people into traitors, who seem to
themselves not merely innocent, but patriotic, and who die for a bad
cause with as quiet a conscience as if it were the best. In the vast
extent of our country,--too vast by far to be taken into one small
human heart,--we inevitably limit to our own State, or, at farthest,
to our own section, that sentiment of physical love for the soil which
renders an Englishman, for example, so intensely sensitive to the
dignity and well-being of his little island, that one hostile foot,
treading anywhere upon it, would make a bruise on each individual
breast. If a man loves his own State, therefore, and is content to be
ruined with her, let us shoot him, if we can, but allow him an
honorable burial in the soil he fights for. [Footnote: We do not
thoroughly comprehend the author's drift in the foregoing paragraph,
but are inclined to think its tone reprehensible, and its tendency
impolitic in the present stage of our national difficulties.]