g us. No wonder that
hard men, bred in foreign camps, find us too good-natured, wanting in
hatred towards our enemies. We can readily believe that it is a special
Providence which has suffered us to meet with a reverse or two, just
enough to sting, without crippling us, only to wake up the slumbering
passion which is the legitimate and chosen instrument of the higher
powers for working out the ends of justice and the good of man.

There are a few far-seeing persons to whom our present sudden mighty
conflict may not have come as a surprise; but to all except these it
is a prodigy as startling as it would be, if the farmers of the North
should find a ripened harvest of blood-red ears of maize upon the
succulent stalks of midsummer. We have lived for peace: as individuals,
to get food, comfort, luxuries for ourselves and others; as communities,
to insure the best conditions we could for each human being, so that he
might become what God meant him to be. The verdict of the world was,
that we were succeeding. Many came to us from the old civilizations;
few went away from us, and most of these such as we could spare without
public loss.

We had almost forgotten the meaning and use of the machinery of
destruction. We had come to look upon our fortresses as the ornaments,
rather than as the defences of our harbors. Our war-ships were the
Government's yacht-squadron, our arsenals museums for the entertainment
of peaceful visitors. The roar of cannon has roused us from this
Arcadian dream. A ship of the line, we said, reproachfully, costs as
much as a college; but we are finding out that its masts are a part of
the fence round the college. The Springfield Arsenal inspired a noble
poem; but that, as we are learning, was not all it was meant for. What
poets would be born to us in the future without the "_placida quies_"
which "_sub libertate_" the sword alone can secure for our children?

It is all plain, but it has been an astonishment to us, as our war-comet
was to the astronomers. The comet, as some of them say, brushed us with
its tail as it passed; yet nobody finds us the worse for it. So, too, we
have been brushed lightly by mishap, as we ought to have been, and as we
ought to have prayed to be, no doubt, if we had known what was good for
us; yet at this very moment we stand stronger, more hopeful, more united
than ever before in our history.

Misfortunes are no new things; yet a man suffering from furuncles will
often sp