em. Patriotism, however, not pride, marked the common mold
of the men of the civil war. It may have been that many an honest
plowman, marching through the muddy quagmires of Pennsylvania Avenue,
bethought himself that such a capital was hardly worth while marching so
far to protect--more emphatically so when the enemy was really to be
found on lines far north of it! Sentiment is the heart and soul of war;
if it were not, there would be no war, for war never gained as much as
it loses; never settled as much as it unsettles; never left victor or
vanquished better when the last gun was fired! In old times the capture
of a nation's capital meant the end of the war, but we have seen
capitals captured and the war not modified a bit by it. Washington was
seized and burned by the British in 1814, and the war went on; Paris was
held by the Germans for half a year, and the war went on.

Our civil war would have been three campaigns shorter--Burnside's,
Hooker's, and the stupid massacre of Pope--to say nothing of the saving
of untold treasure, had the political authorities abandoned a capital
which must be defended for a secure seat like New York or Philadelphia.
The sagacious Lincoln, whose action in army matters was paralyzed by
cliques, in the end saw through sham with an inspired clarity of vision,
and proposed the measure, but the backwoods Mazarin, Seward, prepared
such voluminous "considerations" in opposition that the good-natured
President withdrew his suggestion, and, as a consequence, the dismal
Ilium on the Potomac became the bone of a four years' contention, whose
vicissitudes exceed the incidents of the Iliad. Great armies, created by
an inspired commander, were wasted upon the defense of a capital that no
one would have lamented had it been again burned, and of which to-day
there is scarcely a remnant, save in the public buildings and the
topographical charts. A new race entered the sleepy city. The astute,
far-seeing Yankee divined the possibilities of the future, where the
indolent, sentimental Southerner had never taken thought of a nation's
growth and a people's pride! The thrifty and shifty patriots sent from
the North at once took a stake in the city, and thenceforward there was
growth, if not grace, in the capital.

Lincoln's Washington was to the capital of to-day what the Rome of Numa
was to the imperial city of Augustus. Never, in its best days, more
imposing than a wild Western metropolis of to-day, the s