edy, incessant, and more appalling warfare.
Help him to bear his burdens by showing him how elastic you are under
yours. Hearten him, enliven him, tone him up to the true hero-pitch.
Hush your plaintive _Miserere_, accept the nation's pain for penance,
and commission every Northern breeze to bear a _Te Deum laudamus_.

Under God, the only question, as to whether this war shall be conducted
to a shameful or an honorable close, is not of men or money or material
resource. In these our superiority is unquestioned. As Wellington
phrased it, there is hard pounding; but we shall pound the longest, if
only our hearts do not fail us. Women need not beat their pewter spoons
into bullets, for there are plenty of bullets without them. It is not
whether our soldiers shall fight a good fight; they have played the man
on a hundred battle-fields. It is not whether officers are or are not
competent; generals have blundered nations into victory since the world
began. It is whether this people shall have virtue to endure to the
end,--to endure, not starving, not cold, but the pangs of hope deferred,
of disappointment and uncertainty, of commerce deranged and outward
prosperity cheeked. Will our vigilance to detect treachery and our
perseverance to punish it hold out? If we stand firm, we shall be saved,
though so as by fire. If we do not, we shall fall, and shall richly
deserve to fall; and may God sweep us off from the face of the earth,
and plant in our stead a nation with the hearts of men, and not of
chickens!

O women, stand here in the breach,--for here you may stand powerful,
invincible, I had almost said omnipotent. Rise now to the heights of
a sublime courage,--for the hour has need of you. When the first ball
smote the rocky sides of Sumter, the rebound thrilled from shore to
shore, and waked the slumbering hero in every human soul. Then every eye
flamed, every lip was touched with a live coal from the sacred altar,
every form dilated to the stature of the Golden Age. Then we felt in our
veins the pulse of immortal youth. Then all the chivalry of the ancient
days, all the heroism, all the self-sacrifice that shaped itself into
noble living, came back to us, poured over us, swept away the dross of
selfishness and deception and petty scheming, and Patriotism rose from
the swelling wave stately as a goddess. Patriotism, that had been to us
but a dingy and meaningless antiquity, took on a new form, a new mien, a
countenance divine