.

We, in this new land of ours, have but a very faint experience of the
intense working of such influences upon a people in whom the local
association and sentiment are ingrained. We are but just beginning where
Englishmen began eight centuries and more ago. Hence our glorifying of
the past has been a little indiscriminate, and withal has sought to
commemorate events more than individuals. But the last two years have
taken us through one of those great periods which, in their concentrated
energy, compress the work of years into days, and which mark the
water-sheds of history. The United States of 1865 will be as unlike the
same land in 1855 as the youth is unlike the child. Life is measured by
action, not duration. The brilliant epoch of the first Persian invasion
was more to Greece than its slumbering centuries under Turkish rule, and
"fifty years of Europe" more "than a cycle of Cathay." We shall look
back upon a past. We shall have a truly national existence. It will be
but natural, as it will be most wise, that we take heed of those
elements which have ever been so potent in strengthening national
character. One of these has been briefly hinted at above. Yet it may be
undesirable to perpetuate the memory of events in which the whole
country cannot participate, which will not for the remainder of this
century be thought of by one section without shame and confusion of
face, and which will only tend to keep alive the sad old jealousies and
hates. We shall be very loath to place our monumental columns upon the
fields of Antietam and Gettysburg. We should not tolerate them upon the
slopes of Manassas or the bluffs of Edwards' Ferry. When the war is
ended, and the best guardian of our internal commerce is the loyalty of
the returning citizens to their old allegiance, we shall do wisely to
level the earthworks of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. In the city where
mob-violence is crushed under the force of armed law, no one cares to
keep for a day the crumbling walls and the shattered barricade, though
they may have witnessed heroism as splendid as Arcola or Wagram, for
they witness also to a wickedness and a terror which all would gladly
forget. The only memorial that a wise and high-souled nation _can_ erect
after this war will be the single monument which shall commemorate the
hour of peace restored.

But while we are debarred from thus recording upon tablets more lasting
than brass the story of our mournful triumphs over e