ee, glad giving,
and refusing the marked exception, the world would not have believed it,
_we_ would not have believed it ourselves. Is this nothing?

We will think more of each other also for all this. We will love and
honor each other better. Under the awful pressure of the Hand that lies
upon us so heavily, we are brought into closer knowledge and closer
sympathy. The blows of battle are welding us into one. Fragments of all
people, and all races, cast here by the waves, and strangers to each
other, with a hundred repulsions and separations, even to language,
religions, and morals, the furnace heat of our trial is fusing all parts
into one strong, united whole. We are driven and drawn together by the
sore need that is upon us, and as Americans are forgetting all else. The
civil war is making us _a people_--the American People. We are no longer
'the loose sweepings of all lands,' as they called us. We are one, now,
brethren all in the sacrament of a great sorrow.

And is this nothing?

And these goods and gains are permanent. They do not belong to this
generation only, or to this time exclusively. After all, the nation is
mainly an educator. These things remain, as parts of its moral influence
in moulding and training. And here is their infinite value.
Independence, courage, patience, fortitude, nobleness, self-sacrifice,
and tenderness become the national ethics. These things are pressed home
on all growing minds. Coming generations are to be educated in these, by
the example of the present. We are stamping these things, as the
essentials of the national character, on the ages to come.

A thousand years of prosperity will have no power of this kind. What is
there in Chinese history to elevate a Chinaman? What high, heroic
experience to educate him, in her long centuries of ignoble peace? The
training power of a nation is acquired always in the crises of its
history. In the day when it rises to fight for its life, the typal men,
who give it the lasting models of its excellence, spring forth too for
recognition. The examples of these days of our own crisis will remain
forever to influence the children of our people. We may be thankful, in
our deepest sorrow, that we are leaving them no example of cowardice or
meanness, that we give them a record to read of the courage, endurance,
and manliness of the men that begat them, that the stamp of national
character we leave to teach them is one of which a brave, free people