the
disturbance of all kinds of industry, the suppression of some, the
difficulty of diverting, at a moment's notice, labor towards new
objects,--not only financial embarrassment and exhaustion, and the
shadow of a coming debt,--not the maiming of strong men and their
violent removal from the future labors of peace, nor the emotional
suffering of thousands of families whose hearts are in the field with
their dear ones, tossed to and fro in every skirmish, where the balls
slay more than the bodies which are pierced: not these evils alone,--nor
the feverish excitement of eighteen millions of people, whose gifts
and intelligence are all distraught, and at the mercy of every
bulletin,--nor yet the possible violations of private rights, and the
overriding of legal defences, which, when once attempted in a state of
war, is not always relinquished on the return of peace. These do not
strike us so much as the moral injury which many weak and passionate
minds sustain from the necessity of destroying life, of ravaging and
burning, of inflicting upon the enemy politic distresses. There will be
a taint in the army and the community which will endure in the relations
of pacific life. And more than half a million of men, who have tasted
the fierce joy of battle, have suffered the moral privations and dangers
of the camp, are to be returned suddenly to us, and cast adrift, with no
hope of finding immediate employment, and hankering for some excitements
to replace those of the distant field. If little truth and little
conscience have been at stake, these are the reasons which make wars so
demoralizing: they leave society restored to peace, but still at war
within itself, infested by those strange cravings, and tempted by a
new ambition, that of waging successful wars. This will be the most
dangerous country on the face of the earth, after the termination of
this war; for it will see its own ideas more clearly than ever before,
and long to propagate them with its battle-ardors and its scorn of
hypocritical foreign neutralities. We have the elements to make the most
martial nation in the world, with a peculiar combination of patience and
impulse, coldness and daring, the capacity to lie in watchful calm and
to move with the vibrations of the earthquake. And if ever the voice of
our brother, crying out to us from the ground of any country, shall sigh
among the drums which are then gathering dust in our arsenals, the long
roll would wake a