soever He
will; and he never yet willed that a nation strong in means, and
battling for the right, should be given over to a nation weak and
battling for the wrong. Nations have their future--reward and
penalty--in this world; and it is as certain as God lives, that
Providence AND the heaviest battalions will prevail. We have had
reverses, but no misfortune hath happened unto us but such as is common
unto nations. Country has been sacrificed to partisanship. Early love
has fallen away, and lukewarmness has taken its place. Unlimited
enthusiasm has given place to limited stolidity. Disloyalty, overawed
at first into quietude, has lifted its head among us, and waxes wroth
and ravening. There are dissensions at home worse than the guns of our
foes. Some that did run well have faltered; some signal-lights have
gone shamefully out, and some are lurid with a baleful glare. But unto
this end were we born, and for this cause came we into the world. When
shall greatness of soul stand forth, if not in evil times? When the
skies are fair and the seas smooth, all ships sail festively. But the
clouds lower, the winds shriek, the waves boil, and immediately each
craft shows its quality. The deep is strown with broken masts, parted
keels, floating wrecks; but here and there a ship rides the raging sea,
and flings defiance to the wind. She overlives the sea because she is
sea-worthy. Not our eighty years of peace alone, but our two years of
war, are the touchstone of our character. We have rolled our Democracy
as a sweet morsel under our tongue; we have gloried in the prosperity
which it brought to the individual; but if the comforts of men minister
to the degradation of man, if Democracy levels down and does not level
up, if our era of peace and plenty leaves us so feeble and frivolous,
so childish, so impatient, so deaf to all that calls to us from the
past, and entreats us in the future, that we faint and fail under the
stress of our one short effort, then indeed is our Democracy our shame
and curse. Let us show now what manner of people we are. Let us be
clear-sighted and far-sighted to see how great is the issue that hangs
upon the occasion. It is not a mere military reputation that is at
stake, not the decay of a generation's commerce, not the determination
of this or that party to power. It is the question of the world that
we have been set to answer. In the great conflict of ages, the long
strife between right a