idolatry that made the Greek's ideal
joy--death for the fatherland; some of that burning zeal and godlike
pride that made the earlier Roman esteem his citizenship more precious
than a foreign crown. But until the battle on that awful 21st of July
proved the war real--with the added horror of civil hate--Secretary
Seward's epigram of ninety days clung fast in the public mind.

Up to Bull Run there was a vague feeling that our army, in proper time,
would march down upon the rebels like the hosts of Joshua, and scatter
them and the rebellion to uttermost destruction in one action. It was
upon this assumption that the journals of the North satirized, abused,
vilified Scott, and clamored day by day for an "advance upon Richmond."
The damnation of public clamor, and not the incompetency of the general,
set the inchoate armies of Scott upon that fatal adventure. But that
humiliating, incredible, and for years misunderstood Sunday, on the
plateaus of Manassas, where, after all, blundering and imbecility
brought disaster, but not shame, upon the devoted soldiery, aroused the
sense of the North to the reality of war, as the overthrow at Jemmapes
in 1793 convinced the Prussian oligarchy that the republic in France
was a fact.

It was a dreadful Monday in the North when the first hideous bulletins
were sent broadcast through the cities and carried by couriers into
every hamlet. For hours--sickening hours--it was not believed. We have
awakened many a morning since 1861 to hear of thrones overturned, armies
vanquished, dynasties obliterated; to hear of great men gone by sudden
and cruel death: but the anger and despair when Booth's cruel work was
known; the shuddering horror over Garfield's taking off; the amazement
when the hand of Nihilism laid an emperor dead; the overthrow of Austria
in a single day; the extinction of the Bonapartes--these things were
heard and digested with something like repose compared to the
bewildering outbreak that met the destruction of our army at Manassas.

It was not the dazed, panic-stricken, panic anguish that followed
Fredericksburg or the second Bull Run. It was not the indignant, fretful
wrath that rebuked official culpability for the destruction of the grand
campaign on the Peninsula. It was a startled, incredulous, angry
amazement, in which blame afterward visited upon generals or Cabinet,
was humbly taken on the people's shoulders and echoed in a moaning _mea
culpa_. For days all the people w