grandest fact
was that a multitude of men and women felt and acted as never before for
a cause greater than any personal gain. Under the discipline of
sacrifice and suffering, and with the personal horizon widened to take
in nations and races, a multitude on the field and at home grew to
loftier stature. The hardships and perils which wrecked some
strengthened others. The development of energy and resource was beyond
measure. The North created armies and navies; it organized a new system
of finance; it transformed a peaceful industrial community into an
irresistible military force; and all the while it carried on its
productive industries with scarcely visible shrinkage; farm and mill,
school and college, kept on with their work. The South made itself into
a solid army of resistance; cut off from its accustomed sources of
supply, it developed for itself all the essentials of material life; it
showed an ingenuity and resourcefulness beyond all expectation; and the
fidelity of its slaves supplied its armies with food while keeping its
homes secure. In peace haunted always by latent dread of insurrection,
in war the South found its servants its best friends. So, in both
sections, wonders were wrought and deeds never dreamed of were achieved.

In justly viewing the evil and the good of war, we must compare it with
other disturbances and catastrophes. The finest traits and highest
efficiency of men come out under disasters which yet it must be our
habitual effort to avert. It is the ship on the rocks, the theater on
fire, that shows the hero. But what should we think of one who ran a
ship on shore, or set fire to a theater, in order to call out heroism?
Exactly so are we to regard those who glorify war as in itself a fine
and admirable thing, a proper school and arena of manhood. The
refutation of such talk comes not so well from men of the church or
closet as from those who have drunk deepest of war's reality. A man of
exuberant vitality, whose personal delight in physical strife colors his
statesmanship, and who is exhilarated by the memory of a skirmish or two
in Cuba, may talk exultantly of "glory enough to go round," and preach
soldiering as a splendid manifestation of the strenuous life. But the
grim old warrior whose genius and resolution split the Confederacy like
a wedge, General Sherman, in the very midst of his task wrote to a
friend: "I confess without shame that I am sick and tired of the war.
Its glory is all