he stake was the
life not merely of their country, but of a principle whose rescue was
to make America in very deed a New World, the cradle of a fairer
manhood. Weakness was to be no longer the tyrant's opportunity, but the
victim's claim; labor should never henceforth be degraded as a curse,
but honored as that salt of the earth which keeps life sweet, and gives
its savor to duty. To be of good family should mean being a child of
the one Father of us all; and good birth, the being born into God's
world, and not into a fool's paradise of man's invention. But even had
this moral leaven been wanting, had the popular impulse been merely one
of patriotism, we should have been well content to claim as the result
of democracy that for the first time in the history of the world it had
mustered an army that knew for what it was fighting. Nationality is no
dead abstraction, no unreal sentiment, but a living and operative
virtue in the heart and moral nature of men. It enlivens the dullest
soul with an ideal out of and beyond itself, lifting every faculty to a
higher level of vision and action. It enlarges the narrowest intellect
with a fealty to something better than self. It emancipates men from
petty and personal interests, to make them conscious of sympathies
whose society ennobles. Life has a deeper meaning when its throb beats
time to a common impulse and catches its motion from the general heart.

But while the experience of the last four years has been such, with all
its sorrows, as to make us proud of our strength and grateful for the
sources of it, we cannot but feel that peace will put to the test those
higher qualities which war leaves in reserve. What are we to do with
the country our arms have regained? It is by our conduct in this
stewardship, and not by our rights under the original compact of the
States, that our policy is to be justified. The glory of conquest is
trifling and barren, unless victory clear the way to a higher
civilization, a more solid prosperity, and a Union based upon
reciprocal benefits. In what precise manner the seceding States shall
return, whether by inherent right, or with some preliminary penance and
ceremony of readoption, is of less consequence than what they shall be
after their return. Dependent provinces, sullenly submitting to a
destiny which they loathe, would be a burden to us, rather than an
increase of strength or an element of prosperity. War would have won us
a peace stripped