In the midst of this stupendous conflict, individuals seem to be as insignificant and powerless to control it, as if they stood, awed and subdued by the warring elements of nature, and compelled to wait until these should expend their fury and of themselves subside. Thirty millions of people have been suddenly and unexpectedly divided, and the sundered parts have been thrown into fierce and deadly antagonism. Belligerent passions rage and boil among them with all the ungovernable power of the angry waves when the sea is lashed by the destructive tempest. The throes of the suffering nation are as terrible as those of the trembling earth, when, by some internal convulsion, its very foundations seem to be rocked on the fiery waves of the central abyss, and every living creature on its surface becomes agitated with profound dismay. States have been temporarily but rudely torn from their long and peaceful connections with sister States, and great rents in the political soil, filled with the bodies of slaughtered citizens, mark the lines of separation. Vast armies have been assembled and organized, and have met each other in the shock of battle, on fields made slippery with fraternal blood, where tens of thousands have fallen to rise no more--swept down by the relentless storm of iron hail with which brother has greeted brother in this most unholy war. The measured tramp of the armed hosts has shaken the continent; and the vengeful cries of the unnatural strife have disturbed the inmost peaceful recesses of its great central plains and mountains. From California to Texas; from Colorado to New Mexico; from Maine to New Orleans; from the great lakes to the coasts of the Carolinas; and along the measureless length of 'the father of waters' and his great tributaries, the gathering armies have marched or sailed, and swarmed to the beat of the drum and the sound of the trumpet. More than a million of men, on both sides, have been engaged in these tremendous movements, which unhappily correspond too well in their unexampled magnitude with the physical character of our magnificent country. Civil war has sacrilegiously usurped the mighty instrumentalities of modern peaceful life; and the bloody and destructive work of these vast armies is not less gigantic in scale than have been the ordinary operations of our wonderful industry and our ever-increasing commerce. The sacrifice of life, the destruction of property, the desolation of extensive regions of beautiful and fertile country, the vast expenditure of public means, all concur to characterize this as the grandest and most terrible phenomenon of the kind that has ever occurred in the history of man. To us, who are in the midst of it, and destined to be involved in its results, whatever they may be, it is a subject of deep and awful interest; and while the scenes of the momentous drama are continually shifting around us and presenting new spectacles of slaughter and disaster every day, it is hardly possible to maintain the calmness necessary for an impartial appreciation of the causes which have been sufficiently powerful to turn the destructive energies of so great a nation upon itself, causing it to rend and destroy its own body politic, so recently rejoicing in unexampled prosperity and happiness. Some gigantic power, wielding strength enough to produce the tremendous results already visible, must be somewhere hidden at the source of these grand phenomena. In the physical world, a small quantity of water or a few kegs of powder, flashing into steam or gas by the application of heat, may be used to overthrow the most stupendous material fabrics which the labor and genius of men have ever been able to erect. What fatal means of destruction, and what traitorous hand have been employed to drill and charge the solid columns, or to mine the deep foundations of that beautiful and majestic structure of liberty, which our fathers reared for us with so much labor and sacrifice?