War is a great evil. We may confess that, at the start. The Peace
Society has the argument its own way. The bloody field, the mangled
dying, hoof-trampled into the reeking sod, the groans, and cries, and
curses, the wrath, and hate, and madness, the horror and the hell of a
great battle, are things no rhetoric can ever make lovely.
The poet may weave his wreath of victory for the conqueror; the
historian, with all the pomp of splendid imagery, may describe the
heroism of the day of slaughter; but, after all, and none know this
better than the men most familiar with it, a great battle is the most
hateful and hellish sight that the sun looks on in all his courses.
And the actual battle is only a part. The curse goes far beyond the
field of combat. The trampled dead and dying are but a tithe of the
actual sufferers. There are desolate homes, far away, where want changes
sorrow into madness. Wives wail by hearthstones where the household
fires have died into cold ashes forever more. Like Rachel, mothers weep
for the proud boys that lie stark beneath the pitiless stars. Under a
thousand roofs--cottage roofs and palace roofs--little children ask for
'father.' The pattering feet shall never run to meet, upon the
threshold, _his_ feet, who lies stiffening in the bloody trench far
away!
There are added horrors in _civil war_. These forms, crushed and torn
out of all human semblance, are our brothers. These wailing widows,
these small fatherless ones speak our mother language, utter their pain
in the tongue of our own wives and children. Victory seems barely better
than defeat, when it is victory over our own blood. The scars we carve
with steel or burn with powder across the shuddering land, are scars on
the dear face of the Motherland we love. These blackened roof-trees,
they are the homes of our kindred. These cities, where shells are
bursting through crumbling wall and flaming spire, they are cities of
our own fair land, perhaps the brightest jewels in her crown.
Ay! men do well to pray for _peace!_ With suppliant palms outstretched
to the pitying God, they do well to cry, as in the ancient litany, 'Give
peace in our time, O Lord!' Let the husbandman go forth in the furrow.
Let the cattle come lowing to the stalls at evening. Let bleating
flocks whiten all the uplands. Let harvest hymns be sung, while groaning
wagons drag to bursting barns their mighty weight of sheaves. Let mill
wheels turn their dripping rounds by every stream. Let sails whiten
along every river. Let the smoke of a million peaceful hearths rise like
incense in the morning. Let the shouts of happy children, at their play,
ring down ten thousand valleys in the summer day's decline. Over all the
blessed land, asleep beneath the shadow of the Almighty hand, let the
peace of God rest in benediction! 'Give _peace_ in our time, O Lord!'
And yet the final clause to, every human prayer must be 'Thy will be
done!' There are things better far than peace. There are things more
loathely and more terrible than, the horror of battle and 'garments
rolled in blood.' Peace is blessed, but if you have peace with hell, how
about the blessedness? A covenant with evil is not the sort of agreement
that will bring comfort. A truce with Satan is not the thing that it
will do to trust. There are things in this world, without which the
prayer for peace is 'a witch's prayer,' read backward to a curse.
That is to say, whether peace is good depends entirely on the further
question, With whom are you at peace? Whether war is evil depends on the
other question, With whom are you at war? In one most serious and
substantial point of view, human life is a battle, which, for the
individual, ends only with death, and, for the race, only with the Final
Consummation. The tenure of our place and right, as children of God, is
that we fight evil to the bitter end. 'The Prince of Peace' Himself came
'not to send peace,' in this war, 'but a sword.'
We may venture, then, to say that there are some wars which are not all
evil. They are terrible, but terrible like the hurricane, which sweeps
away the pestilence; terrible like the earthquake, on whose night of
terror God builds a thousand years of blooming plenty; terrible like the
volcano, whose ashes are clothed by the purple vintages and yellow
harvests of a hundred generations. The strong powers of nature are as
beneficent as strong. The destroying powers are also creating powers.
Life sits upon the sepulchre, and sings over buried Death through all
nature and all time. War, too, has its compensations.
For years, amid the world's rages, _we_ had peace. The only war we had,
at all events, was one of our own seeking, and a mere playing at war.
Many of us thought it would be so always. We believed we had discovered
a method of settling all the world's difficulties without blows. The
peace people had their jubilee. They talked about the advance of
intelligence, and the softening power of civilization. They placed war
among the forgotten horrors of a dead barbarism. They proved that
commerce had rendered war impossible, because it had made it against
self-interest. They talked about reason and persuasion, and moral
influences. They asked, 'Why not settle all troubles in a grand world's
congress, some huge palaver and paradise of speechmakers, where it will
be all talk and voting and no blows?' Why not, indeed? How easy to
'resolve' this poor, blind, struggling world of ours into a bit of
heaven, you see, and so end our troubles! How easy to vote these poor,
stupid, blundering brothers of ours into angels, in some great
parliament of eloquent philosophers, and govern them thereafter on that
basis!
Now, resolutions and speeches and grand palavers are nice things, in
their way, _to play with_, but, on the whole, it is best to get down to
the hard fact if one really wants to work and prosper. And the hard fact
is, that Adam's sons are not yet cherubs, nor their homestead, among the
stars, just yet an outlying field of paradise. It is a planet whose
private affairs are badly muddled. Its tenants for life are a
quarrelsome, ill-tempered, unruly set of creatures altogether. As things
go, they will break each others' heads sometimes. It is very
unreasonable. I can see that. But men are not always reasonable. It is
not for their own interest. I can see that too. But how often does
interest, the best and highest, raise an impregnable barrier against
passion or even caprice?
We must take men as they are, and the world as we find it, to get a
secure ground for attempting the reformation of either. And as men are,
and as I find the world, at present, I meet Wrong, and find it armed to
resist Right. The Wrong will not yield to persuasion, it will not
surrender to reason. It comes straight on, coarse, brutal, devilish,
caring not a straw for peace rhetoric or Quaker gravity, for persuasion
or interest. It strikes straight down at right or justice. It tries to
hammer them to atoms, and trample them with swinish hoofs into the mire.
Now what am I to do? To stand peaceably by and see this thing done,
while I study new tropes and invent new metaphors to _persuade_? Is that
my business, to waste the godlike gift of human speech on this mad brute
or devil?
With wise pains and thoughtful labor, I clear my little spot of this
stubborn soil. I hedge and plant my small vineyard. It begins, after
much care, to yield me some fruit. I get a little corn and a little
wine, to comfort me and mine. I have good hope that, as the years go by,
I shall gather more. I trust, at last, my purple vintages may gladden
many hearts of men, my rich olives make many faces shine. But some day,
from the yet untamed forest, bursts the wild boar, and rushes on my
hedge, and will break through to trample down my vineyard before mine
eyes. And I am only to _argue_ with him! I am to cast the pearls of
human reason and persuasion at his feet to stop him! Nay, rather, am I
not to seize the first sufficient weapon that comes to hand, unloose the
dogs upon him, and drive him to his lair again, or, better, bring his
head in triumph home?
It is true, there are wars where this parable will not apply. There are
capricious wars, wars undertaken for no fit cause, wars with scarce a
principle on either side. Such have often been _king's wars_, begun in
folly, conducted in vanity, ended in shame, wars for the ambition of
some crowned scoundrel, who rides a patient people till he drives them
mad. And even such wars have their uses. They are not wholly evil.
Alexander's, the maddest wars of all, and those of his successors, the
most stupid and brutal ever fought, even they had their uses. Our war
with poor Mexico, even Louis Bonaparte's, was not wholly evil.
But there are wars, again, that are not capricious, that are simply
necessary, unavoidable, as life, death, or judgment, wars where the
choice is to see right trampled out of sight or to fight for it, where
truth and justice are crushed unless the sword be grasped and used,
where law and civilization and Christianity are assailed by savagery,
brutality, and devilishness, and only the true bullet and the cold steel
are received in the discussion. These are the Peoples' wars. In them
nations arm. Generations swarm to their battle fields. They are
landmarks in the world's advancement. For victories in them men sing _Te
Deums_ throughout the ages. The heroes, who fell in them, loom through
the haze of time like demigods.
On the plains of Tours, when the Moslem tide, that swept on to overwhelm
in ruin Christian Europe, was met, and stemmed, and turned by Charles
Martel, and, breaking into foam against the iron breasts of his stalwart
Franks, was whirled away into the darkness like spray before the
tempest, the _Hammer-man_ did a work that day that, till the end of
time, a world will thank Heaven for, as _he_ thanked it in the hour of
victory.
And when his greater grandson, creator, guide, and guardian of modern
civilization, paced with restless, ever-present steps, around the
borders of that small world of light which he had built up, half
blindly, in the overwhelming dark, and with two-handed blows beat back,
with the iron mace of Germany, the savage assaults of Saracen and
Sclave, of black Dane and brutal Wendt, and smote on till he died
smiting, for order, and law, and faith, and so saved Europe, and, let us
humbly hope, his own rude but true soul _alive_! are not the thanks of
all the world well due, that Karl der Grosse was no non-resistant, but a
great, broad-shouldered, royal soldier, who wore the imperial purple by
right of a moat imperial sword?
There are wars like these, that, as the world goes, are inevitable. Some
wrong undertakes to rule. Some lie challenges sovereignty. Some mere
brutality or heathenism faces order, civilization, and law. There is no
choice in the matter _then_. The wrong, the lie, the brutality, the
barbarism _must go down_. If they listen to reason, well. If they can be
only preached or lectured into dying peaceably, and getting quietly
buried, it is an excellent consummation. If they do not, if they try
conclusions, as they are far more apt to do, if they come on with brute
force, there is no alternative. They must be met by force. They must get
the only persuasion that can influence them--hard knocks, and plenty of
them, well delivered, straight at the heart.
Wars so undertaken, under a divine necessity, and with a divine sadness,
too, by a patient people, whose business is not brutal fighting, but
peaceful working, wars of this sort, in the world's long history, are
scarce evils at all, and, even in the day of their wrath, bring
compensative blessings. They may be fierce and terrible, they may bring
wretchedness and ruin, they may 'demoralize' armies and people, they may
be dreadful evils, and leave long trails of desolation, but they are
none the less wars for victories in which men will return thanks while
the world shall stand. The men who fall in such wars, receive the
benedictions of their kind. The people that, with patient pain, stands
and fights in them, bleeding drop by drop, and conquering or dying, inch
by inch, but never yielding, because it feels the deathless value of
_the cause_, the brave, calm people, who so fight is crowned forever on
the earth.
From our paradise of a lamb-like world this nation was awakened, three
years ago, by a cannon shot across Charleston harbor. The fools who
fired it knew not what they did, perhaps. They thought to open fire on a
poor old fort and its handful of a garrison. They _did_ open fire on
civilization, on order, on law, on the world's progress, on the hopes of
man. There, at last, we were brought face to face with hard facts. Talk,
in Congress, or out, was at an end. Voting and balloting, and
speech-making were ruled out of order. We had administered the country,
so far, by that machinery. It was puffed away at one discharge of glazed
powder. The cannon alone could get a hearing. The bullet and the bayonet
were the only arguments. No matter how it might end, we were forced to
accept the challenge. No matter how utterly we might hate war, we were
forced to try the last old persuasive--the naked sword.
I cannot see how any honest and sensible man can now look back and see
any other course possible. Could we stand by and see our house beaten
into blackened ruin over our heads? Were we to talk 'peace,' and use
'moral suasion' in the mouth of shotted cannon? Were we prepared to see
the Constitution and the law, bought by long years of toil and blood,
torn to tatters by the caprice of ambitious madmen? Fighting became a
simple duty in an hour! There was no escape. What a pity that so many
beautiful peace speeches (Charles Sumner's very eloquent ones among the
rest!) should have been proved mere froth and wasted paper rags by one
short telegram!
So the great evil came to _us_, as it has come to all nations, as we
believe it _must_ come, from what we now see, to every nation that will
be great and strong. The land, for a time, staggered under the blow.
Men's souls for an hour were struck dumb, so sudden was it, so unlocked
for. As duty became clearer, we awaked at last to the fact that was at
our doors. We turned to deal with it, as the best nations always do,
cheerfully and hopefully. We have made mistakes and great ones. We have
blundered fearfully. That was to have been expected. But we have gone
on, nevertheless, steadfastly, patiently. That was also to have been
expected. For three years and over, this has been our business. We have
indeed carried on some commerce, and some manufactures, and some
agriculture, but our main work has been fighting. The rest have been
subsidiary to that. And the land groans and pants with this bloody toil.
It clothes itself in mourning and darkens its streets, and desolates its
homes, and bleeds its life drops slowly in its patient agony. But it
never falters. It has accepted the appointed work. It sees no outlook
yet, no chance for the bells to ring out peace over the roar of cannon,
and it stands at its post bleeding, but wrestling still.
Has there been nothing gained, however? For the terrible outlay is there
yet no return? Has the war been evil and only evil so far, even granting
that we do not finally succeed, according to our wish? The present
writer does not think so. He believes there have been gains already, and
great gains, not merely the gains that may be summed in the advance of
forces, in territory recovered, in cities taken, in enemies defeated,
but gains which, though not visible like these, are no less real and
vastly more valuable, gains which add to the nation's moral power, and
educate it for the future. He leaves to others the consideration of the
material gain, and desires to hint, at least, at this other, which is
much more likely to be slighted or perhaps forgotten.
He has said enough to show that he does not like this slaughtering
business in any shape. He is sure that the sooner it is ended the
better. He has had its bloody consequences brought, in their most
fearful form, to his own heart and home, but he has a fixed faith,
nevertheless, that any duty, conscientiously undertaken, any duty from
which there is no honorable or honest escape, must, if faithfully
performed, obtain its meet reward. And believing that this business of
war has been undertaken by the mass of the people of these United States
in all simplicity of heart and honesty of purpose, as an unavoidable and
hard necessity, he also believes they will get their honest wages for
the doing it. He believes, too, that the day of recompense is not
entirely delayed; that benefits, large and excellent, have already
resulted to the nation. He sees already visible uses, which, to some
extent at least, should comfort and sustain a people, even under the
awful curse and agony of a civil war. He writes to show these uses to
others, that they too may take heart and hope, when the days are
darkest.
In the first place, this war is, at last, our _national independence_.
To be sure, we read of a war carried on by our fathers to secure that
boon. They paid a large price for it, and they got it, and got all
nations to acknowledge they deserved it, including the great nation they
fought with. It was their _political_ independence only. It secured
nothing beyond that. _Morally_ we were not independent. _Socially_, we
were not independent. There was a time, we can all remember it, when we
literally trembled before every cockney that strangled innocent
aspirates at their birth. We had not secured our moral independence of
Europe, and particularly not of our own kindred and people. We literally
crouched at the feet of England, and begged for recognition like a poor,
disowned relation. We scarcely knew what was right till England told us.
We dare not accept a thing as wise, proper, or becoming till we had
heard her verdict. What will England say? How will they think of this
across the water? In all emergencies these were the questions thought,
at least, if not spoken. We lived in perpetual terror of transatlantic
opinion. Some cockney came to visit us. He might be a fool, a puppy, an
intolerably bore, an infinite ass. It made no difference. He rode our
consciousness like a nightmare. He and his note book dominated free
America. 'What does he think of us? What will he say of us?' We actually
grovelled before the creature, more than once begging for his good word,
his kindly forbearance, his pity for our faults and failures. 'We know
we are wicked, for we are republicans, O serene John! We are sinful, for
we have no parish beadle. We are no better than the publicans, for we
have no workhouse. We are altogether sinners, for we have no lord. It is
also a sad truth that there are people among us who have been seen to
eat with a knife, and but very few that could say, '_H_old _H_ingland,'
with the true London aspiration. But be merciful notwithstanding. We beg
pardon for all our faults. We recognize thy great kindness in coming
among such barbarians. We will treat thee kindly as we can, and copy thy
manners as closely as we can, and so try to improve ourselves. Do not,
therefore, for the present, annihilate us with the indignation of thy
outraged virtue. Have a touch of pity for us unfortunate and degenerate
Americans!'
That supplication is hardly an exaggeration. It was utterly shameful,
the position we took in this matter of deference to English opinion. No
people ever more grossly imposed upon themselves. We had an ideal
England, which we almost worshipped, whose good opinion we coveted like
the praise of a good conscience. We bowed before her word, as the child
bows to the rebuke of a mother he reverences. She was Shakspeare's
England, Raleigh's England, Sidney's England, the England of heroes and
bards and sages, our grand old Mother, who had sat crowned among the
nations for a thousand years. We were proud to claim even remote
relationship with the Island Queen. We were proud to speak her tongue,
to reenact her laws, to read her sages, to sing her songs, to claim her
ancient glory as partly our own. England, the stormy cradle of our
nation, the sullen mistress of the angry western seas, our hearts went
out to her, across the ocean, across the years, across war, across
injustice, and went out still in love and reverence. We never dreamed
that our ideal England was dead and buried, that the actual England was
not the marble goddess of our idolatry, but a poor Brummagem image,
coarse lacquer-ware and tawdry paint! We never dreamed that the queenly
mother of heroes was nursing 'shopkeepers' now, with only shopkeepers'
ethics, 'pawnbrokers' morality'!
At last our eyes are opened. To-day we stand a self-centred nation. We
have seen so much of English consistency, of English nobleness, we have
so learned to prize English honor and English generosity, that there is
not a living American, North or South, who values English opinion, on
any point of national right, duty, or manliness, above the idle
whistling of the wind. Who considers it of the slightest consequence now
what England may think on any matter American? Who has the curiosity to
ask after an English opinion?
This much the war has done for us. We are at last a _nation_. We have
found a conscience of our own. We have been forced to stand on our own
national sense of right and wrong. We are independent morally as well as
politically, in opinion as well as in government. We shall never turn
our eyes again across the sea to ask what any there may say or think of
us. We have found that perhaps we do not understand them. We have
certainly found that they do not understand us. We have taken the stand
which every great people is obliged to take soon or late. We are
sufficient for ourselves. Our own national conscience, our own sense of
right and duty, our own public sentiment is our guide henceforth. By
that we stand or fall. By that, and that only, will we consent that men
should judge us. We are a grown-up nation from this time forth. We
answer for ourselves to humanity and the future. We decide all causes at
our own judgment seat.
And there is another good, perhaps larger than this, which we have won,
a good which contains and justifies this moral, national independence:
We have been baptized at last into the family of great nations, by that
red baptism which, from the first, has been the required initiation into
that august brotherhood.
It seems to be the invariable law, of earthly life at least, that
humanity can advance only by the road of suffering. It is so with
individuals. There is no spiritual growth without pain. Prosperity alone
never makes a grand character. Purple and fine linen never clothe the
hero. There are powers and gifts in the soul of man that only come to
life and action in some day of bitterness. There are wells in the heart,
whose crystal waters lie in darkness till some earthquake shakes the
man's nature to its centre, bursts the fountain open, and lets the
cooling waters out to refresh a parched land. There are seeds of noblest
fruits that lie latent in the soul, till some storm of sorrow shakes
down tears to moisten, and some burning sun of scorching pain sends heat
to warm them into a harvest of blessings.
By trouble met and patiently mastered, by suffering endured and
conquered, by trials tested and overcome, so only does a man's soul grow
to manliness.
Now a nation is made up of single men. The law holds for the mass as for
the individuals. It took a thousand years of toil, and war, and
suffering, to make the Europe that we have. It took a thousand years of
wrestle for the very life itself, to build Rome before. To be sure, we
inherited all that this past of agony had bought the world. For us Rome
had lived, fought, toiled, and fallen. For us Celt, Saxon, Norman had
wrought and striven. We started with the accumulated capital of a
hundred generations. It was perhaps natural to suppose we might escape
the hard necessity of our fathers. We might surely profit by their
dear-bought experience. The wrecks, strewn along the shores, would be
effectual warnings to our gallant vessel on the dangerous seas where
they had sailed. In peace, plenty, and prosperity, we might be carried
to the highest reach of national greatness.
Nay! never, unless we give the lie to all the world's experience! There
never was a great nation yet nursed on pap, and swathed in silk. Storms
broke around its rude cradle instead. The tempests rocked the stalwart
child. The dragons came to strangle the baby Hercules in his swaddling
clothes. The magnificent commerce, the increasing manufactures, the
teeming soil, the wealth fast accumulating, they would never have made
us, after all, a great people. They would have eaten the manhood out of
us at last. We were becoming selfish, self-indulgent, sybaritic rapidly.
The nation's muscle was softening, its heart was hardening. If we were
to become a great nation, we needed more than commerce, more than
plenty, more than rapid riches, more than a comfortable, indulgent life.
If we were to be one of the world's great peoples, a people to dig deep
and build strong, a people whose name and fame the world was to accept
as a part of itself, we must look to pay the price inflexibly demanded
at every people's hand, and count it out in sweat drops, tear drops,
blood drops, to the last unit.
We have been patiently counting out this costly currency for three slow
years. I pity the moral outlook of the man who does not see that we have
received largely of our purchase.
From a nation whom the world believed, and whom itself believed, to be
sunk in hopeless mammon worship, we have risen to be a nation that pours
out its wealth like water for a noble purpose. Never again will 'the
almighty dollar' be called America's divinity. We were sinking fast to
low aims and selfish purposes, and wise men groaned at national
degeneracy. The summons came, and millions leaped to offer all they had,
to fling fortune, limb, and life on the altar of an unselfish cause. The
dead manhood of the nation sprang to life at the call. We proved the
redness of the old faithful, manly blood, to be as bright as ever.
I know we hear men talk of the demoralization produced by war. There is
a great deal they can say eloquently on that side. Drunkenness,
licentiousness, lawlessness, they say are produced by it, already to an
extent fearful to consider. And scoundrels are using the land's
necessities for their own selfish purposes, and fattening on its blood.
These things are all true, and a great deal more of the same sort
beside. And it may be well at times, with good purpose, to consider
them. But it is not well to consider them alone, and speak of them as
the only moral results of the war. No! by the ten thousands who have
died for the grand idea of National Unity, by the unselfish heroes who
have thrown themselves, a living wall, before the parricidal hands of
traitors, who have perished that the land they loved beyond life might
not perish, by the example and the memory they have left in ten thousand
homes, which their death has consecrated for the nation's reverence by
_their_ lives and deaths, we protest against the one-sided view that
looks only on the moral _evil_ of the struggle!
The truth is, there are war vices and war virtues. There are peace vices
and there are peace virtues. Decorous quiet, orderly habits, sober
conduct, attention to business, these are the good things demanded by
society in peace. And they may consist with meanness, selfishness,
cowardice, and utter unmanliness. The round-stomached, prosperous man,
with his ships, shops, and factories, is very anxious for the
cultivation of these virtues. He does not like to be disturbed o'
nights. He wants his street to be quiet and orderly. He wants to be left
undisturbed to prosecute his prosperous business. He measures virtue by
the aid it offers for that end. Peace vices, the cankers that gnaw a
nation's heart, greed, self-seeking luxury, epicurean self-indulgence,
hardness to growing ignorance, want, and suffering, indifference to all
high purposes, spiritual _coma_ and deadness, these do not disturb him.
They are rotting the nation to its marrow, but they do not stand in the
way of his money-getting. He never thinks of them as evils at all. To be
sure, sometimes, across his torpid brain and heart may echo some harsh
expressions, from those stern old Hebrew prophets, about these things.
But he has a very comfortable pew, in a very soporific church, and he is
only half awake, and the echo dies away and leaves no sign. _He_ is just
the man to tell us all about the demoralization of war.
Now quietness and good order, sober, discreet, self-seeking, decorous
epicureanism and the rest, are not precisely the virtues that will save
a people. There are certain old foundation virtues of another kind,
which are the only safe substratum for national or personal salvation.
These are courage--hard, muscular, manly courage--fortitude, patience,
obedience to discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, veracity of
purpose, and such like. These rough old virtues must lie at the base of
all right character. You may add, as ornaments to your edifice, as
frieze, cornices, and capitals to the pillars, refinements, and
courtesies, and gentleness, and so on. But the foundation must rest on
the rude granite blocks we have mentioned, or your gingerbread erection
will go down in the first storm.
And the simple fact is that peace has a tendency to eat out just these
foundation virtues. They are _war_ virtues; just the things called out
by a life-and-death battle for some good cause. In these virtues we
claim the land has grown. The national character has deepened and
intensified in these. We have strengthened anew these rocky foundations
of a nation's greatness. Men lapped in luxury have patiently bowed to
toil and weariness. Men living in self-indulgence have shaken off their
sloth, and roused the old slumbering fearlessness of their race. Men,
living for selfish ends, have been penetrated by the light of a great
purpose, and have risen to the loftiness of human duty. Men, who shrank
from pain as the sorest evil, have voluntarily accepted pain, and borne
it with a fortitude we once believed lost from among mankind; and, over
all, the flaming light of a worthy cause that men might worthily live
for and worthily die for, has led the thousands of the land out of their
narrow lives, and low endeavors, to the clear mountain heights of
sacrifice! We stand now, a courageous, patient, steadfast, unselfish
people before all the world. We stand, a people that has taken its life
in its hand for a purely unselfish cause. We have won our place in the
foremost rank of nations, not on our wealth, our numbers, or our
prosperity, but on the truer test of our manhood, truth, and
steadfastness. We stand justified at the bar of our own conscience, for
national pride and self-reliance, as we shall infallibly be justified at
the bar of the world.
Is this lifting up of a great people nothing? Is this placing of twenty
millions on the clear ground of unselfish duty, as life's motive,
nothing? Is there one of us, to-day, who is not prouder of his nation
and its character, in the midst of its desperate tug for life, than he
ever was in the day of its envied prosperity? And when he considers how
the nation has answered to its hard necessity, how it has borne itself
in its sore trial, is he not clear of all doubt about its vitality and
continuance? And is that, also, nothing?
But besides this education in the stern, rude, heroic virtues that prop
a people's life, there has been an education in some others, which,
though apparently opposed, are really kindred. Unselfish courage is
noble, but always with the highest courage there lives a great pity and
tenderness. The brave man is always soft hearted. The most courageous
people are the tenderest people. The highest manhood dwells with the
highest womanhood.
So the heart of the nation has been touched and softened, while its
muscles have been steeled. While it has grasped the sword, it has
grasped it weeping in infinite pity. It has recognized the truth of
human brotherhood as it never did before. All ranks have been drawn
together in mutual sympathy. All barriers, that hedge brethren apart,
have been broken down in the common suffering.
News comes, to-day, that a great battle has been fought, and wounded
thousands of our brothers need aid and care. You tell the news in any
city or hamlet in the land, and hands are opened, purses emptied, stores
ransacked for comforts for the suffering, and gentle women, in
hundreds, are ready to tend them as they would their own. Is this no
gain? Is it nothing that the selfishness of us all has been broken up as
by an earthquake, and that kindness, charity, and pity to the sick and
needy have become the law of our lives? Count the millions that have
streamed forth from a people whose heart has been touched by a common
suffering, in kindness to wounded and sick soldiers and to their needy
families! Benevolence has become the atmosphere of the land.
Four years ago we could not have believed it. That the voluntary charity
of Americans would count by millions yearly, would flow out in a steady,
deep, increasing tide, that giving would be the rule, free, glad giving,
and refusing the marked exception, the world would not have believed it,
_we_ would not have believed it ourselves. Is this nothing?
We will think more of each other also for all this. We will love and
honor each other better. Under the awful pressure of the Hand that lies
upon us so heavily, we are brought into closer knowledge and closer
sympathy. The blows of battle are welding us into one. Fragments of all
people, and all races, cast here by the waves, and strangers to each
other, with a hundred repulsions and separations, even to language,
religions, and morals, the furnace heat of our trial is fusing all parts
into one strong, united whole. We are driven and drawn together by the
sore need that is upon us, and as Americans are forgetting all else. The
civil war is making us _a people_--the American People. We are no longer
'the loose sweepings of all lands,' as they called us. We are one, now,
brethren all in the sacrament of a great sorrow.
And is this nothing?
And these goods and gains are permanent. They do not belong to this
generation only, or to this time exclusively. After all, the nation is
mainly an educator. These things remain, as parts of its moral influence
in moulding and training. And here is their infinite value.
Independence, courage, patience, fortitude, nobleness, self-sacrifice,
and tenderness become the national ethics. These things are pressed home
on all growing minds. Coming generations are to be educated in these, by
the example of the present. We are stamping these things, as the
essentials of the national character, on the ages to come.
A thousand years of prosperity will have no power of this kind. What is
there in Chinese history to elevate a Chinaman? What high, heroic
experience to educate him, in her long centuries of ignoble peace? The
training power of a nation is acquired always in the crises of its
history. In the day when it rises to fight for its life, the typal men,
who give it the lasting models of its excellence, spring forth too for
recognition. The examples of these days of our own crisis will remain
forever to influence the children of our people. We may be thankful, in
our deepest sorrow, that we are leaving them no example of cowardice or
meanness, that we give them a record to read of the courage, endurance,
and manliness of the men that begat them, that the stamp of national
character we leave to teach them is one of which a brave, free people
need never be ashamed, that, in the troubles they may be called to face,
we leave them, as the national and tried cure for _all_ troubles, the
bold, true heart, the willing hand, the strong arm, and faith in the
Lord of Hosts. Shiloh, Stone River, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness, and
a hundred others, are the heroic names that will educate our
grandchildren, as Bunker Hill, Yorktown, and Saratoga have educated
ourselves. Who will say that a heritage of heroism and truth and loyalty
like this, to leave to the land we love, is nothing? Who can count the
price that will sum its value?
Here, at least, are some of the gains of our civil war. We seek not to
penetrate the councils of the Omniscient, or guess His purposes, though
we may humbly hope there are vaster things than these in store for
humanity and the world as the results of the struggle. Believing that He
governs still, that He reigns on the James, as He reigned on the Jordan,
that _He_ decides the end, and not President Lincoln or Jefferson Davis,
and not General Grant or General Lee, we have firm faith that this awful
struggle is no brute fight of beasts or ruffians, but a grand world's
war of heroes. We believe He will justify His government in the end, and
make this struggle praise Him, in the blessed days that are to come. But
we leave all those dim results unguessed at, as we leave the purposes of
the war itself unmentioned, and the ends which justify us in fighting
on. Men, by this time, have made up their minds, once for all, on these
last points. The nation has chosen, and in its own conscience, let
others think as they may, accepts the responsibility cheerfully.
It is enough to indicate, as we have done, some _real_, though
immaterial, results already attained, results which, to the philosopher
or thoughtful statesman, are worth a very large outlay. They do not,
indeed, remove the horror of war, they do not ask us not to seek peace,
they do not dry the tears, or hide the blood of the contest, but they do
show us that war is no unmixed evil, that even honest, faithful war-work
is acceptable work, and will be paid for.
They declare that, after all, war is a means of moral training, that
'Carnage' may be, as the gentlest of poets wrote, 'God's daughter,' that
battles may be blessings to be thankful for in the long march of time.
They bring to our consciousness, once more, the fact that a Great
Battle, amid all its horror, wrath, and blood, is something sacred
still, an earthly shadow of that Unseen Battle which has stormed through
time, between the hosts of Light and Darkness. They declare again, to
the nation, that old truth, without which the nation perishes and man
rots, that to die in some good cause is the noblest thing a man can do
on earth. They bid us bend in hope beneath the awful hand of the GOD OF
BATTLES, and do our appointed work patiently, bravely, loyally, till
_He_ brings the end. They tell us that not work only, but heroic
fighting, also, is a worship accepted at His seat. They bid us be
thankful, as for the most sacred of all gifts, that thousands, in this
loyal land of ours, have had the high grace, given from above,
'To search through all they felt and saw,
The springs of life, the depths of awe,
And reach _the law within the law_:
'To pass, when Life her light withdraws,
Not void of righteous self-applause,
Nor in a merely selfish cause--
'In some good cause, not in their own,
To perish, _wept for_, _honored_, _known_,
And like a warrior overthrown.'