he
Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll,
which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, about that
time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls dropping in from
the neighboring heights at all hours,--in token of which see the tower
of Brattle Street Church at this very day? War in her memory means
'76. As for the brush of 1812, "we did not think much about that";
and everybody knows that the Mexican business did not concern us much,
except in its political relations. No! war is a new thing to all of us
who are not in the last quarter of their century. We are learning many
strange matters from our fresh experience. And besides, there are new
conditions of existence which make war as it is with us very different
from war as it has been.

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole
nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron
nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and
from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single
living body. The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it
were, move the limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What was
the railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th
of April but a contraction and extension of the arm of Massachusetts
with a clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of instantaneous
action, keeps us always alive with excitement. It is not a breathless
courier who comes back with the report from an army we have lost sight
of for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we are to know
for a week of some great engagement, but almost hourly paragraphs, laden
with truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us restless always
for the last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the movements
of our armies. To-night the stout lumbermen of Maine are encamped under
their own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours they are among the
tobacco-fields and the slave-pens of Virginia. The war passion burned
like scattered coals of fire in the households of Revolutionary times;
now it rushes all through the land like a flame over the prairie.
And this instant diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another
singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion. We
may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what