They must get
the only persuasion that can influence them--hard knocks, and plenty of
them, well delivered, straight at the heart.

Wars so undertaken, under a divine necessity, and with a divine sadness,
too, by a patient people, whose business is not brutal fighting, but
peaceful working, wars of this sort, in the world's long history, are
scarce evils at all, and, even in the day of their wrath, bring
compensative blessings. They may be fierce and terrible, they may bring
wretchedness and ruin, they may 'demoralize' armies and people, they may
be dreadful evils, and leave long trails of desolation, but they are
none the less wars for victories in which men will return thanks while
the world shall stand. The men who fall in such wars, receive the
benedictions of their kind. The people that, with patient pain, stands
and fights in them, bleeding drop by drop, and conquering or dying, inch
by inch, but never yielding, because it feels the deathless value of
_the cause_, the brave, calm people, who so fight is crowned forever on
the earth.

From our paradise of a lamb-like world this nation was awakened, three
years ago, by a cannon shot across Charleston harbor. The fools who
fired it knew not what they did, perhaps. They thought to open fire on a
poor old fort and its handful of a garrison. They _did_ open fire on
civilization, on order, on law, on the world's progress, on the hopes of
man. There, at last, we were brought face to face with hard facts. Talk,
in Congress, or out, was at an end. Voting and balloting, and
speech-making were ruled out of order. We had administered the country,
so far, by that machinery. It was puffed away at one discharge of glazed
powder. The cannon alone could get a hearing. The bullet and the bayonet
were the only arguments. No matter how it might end, we were forced to
accept the challenge. No matter how utterly we might hate war, we were
forced to try the last old persuasive--the naked sword.

I cannot see how any honest and sensible man can now look back and see
any other course possible. Could we stand by and see our house beaten
into blackened ruin over our heads? Were we to talk 'peace,' and use
'moral suasion' in the mouth of shotted cannon? Were we prepared to see
the Constitution and the law, bought by long years of toil and blood,
torn to tatters by the caprice of ambitious madmen? Fighting became a
simple duty in an hour! There was no escape. What a pity that so many
beaut