on the surface, to mend the
financial and industrial distress. Its blush of pride and victory
announces no heady passion. It is the signal which Truth waves from the
hearts of her children.

If we wish directly to consider the effect of war upon our own
intellectual development, we must begin by asking what ideas of
consequence are suggested by our copious use of the word Country. What a
phrase is that--Our Country--which we have been accustomed for eighty
years to use upon all festivals that commemorate civic rights, with
flattering and pompous hopes! We never understood what it meant, till
this moment which threatens to deprive us of the ideas and privileges
which it really represents. We never appreciated till now its depth and
preciousness. Orators have built up, sentence by sentence, a magnificent
estimate of the elements which make our material success, and they
thought it was a patriotic chord which they touched with the climax of
their fine periods. It was such patriotism as thrives in the midst of
content and satisfactory circumstances, which loves to have an inventory
made of all the fixtures and conveniences and the crude splendor of a
country's housekeeping,--things which are not indeed to be despised, for
they show what a people can do when cast upon their own resources, at a
distance from Governmental interference, free to select their own way
of living, to be fervent in business, in charities, in the cause of
education, in the explorations which lay open new regions to the
emigration of a world, in the inventiveness which gives labor new
pursuits and increases the chances of poor men, in the enterprise which
has made foundries, mines, workshops, manufactories, and granaries of
independent States. We have loved to linger over the praises of our
common schools and our voluntary system of congregational worship, to
count the spires which mark every place that man clears to earn his
living in. It has been pleasant to trace upon the map the great arteries
of intercommunication, flowing east and west, churned by countless
paddle-wheels, as they force a vast freight of wealth, material, social,
intellectual, to and fro, a freshet of fertilizing life to swell every
stream. We love to repeat the names which self-taught men have hewn out
in rude places, with the only advantage of being members of Mankind,
holding their own share in the great heart and soul of it, and making
that itself more illustrious than lineag