Passages from an Old Volume of Life | Page 6

new one to this generation of
Americans. Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers
the Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll,
which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, about that
time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls dropping in
from the neighboring heights at all hours,--in token of which see the
tower of Brattle Street Church at this very day? War in her memory
means '76. As for the brush of 1812, "we did not think much about
that"; and everybody knows that the Mexican business did not concern
us much, except in its political relations. No! war is a new thing to all
of us who are not in the last quarter of their century. We are learning
many strange matters from our fresh experience. And besides, there are
new conditions of existence which make war as it is with us very
different from war as it has been.
The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole
nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron
nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and
from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single
living body. The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it
were, move the limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What
was the railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on
the 19th of April but a contraction and extension of the arm of

Massachusetts with a clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?
This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of
instantaneous action, keeps us always alive with excitement. It is not a
breathless courier who comes back with the report from an army we
have lost sight of for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we
are to know for a week of some great engagement, but almost hourly
paragraphs, laden with truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us
restless always for the last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the
movements of our armies. To-night the stout lumbermen of Maine are
encamped under their own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours
they are among the tobacco-fields and the slave-pens of Virginia. The
war passion burned like scattered coals of fire in the households of
Revolutionary times; now it rushes all through the land like a flame
over the prairie. And this instant diffusion of every fact and feeling
produces another singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of
public opinion. We may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as
to what has passed a week afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and
judged as it would have been in a whole season before our national
nervous system was organized.
"As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea, Thou only teachest all
that man can be!"
We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem
of long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful
prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that Society.
Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good-will towards all mankind,
we have felt twinges of conscience about the passage,--especially when
one of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build
and keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop would
give us a new professor. Now we begin to think that there was some
meaning in our poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing else could,
what we can be and are. It has exalted our manhood and our
womanhood, and driven us all back upon our substantial human
qualities, for a long time more or less kept out of sight by the spirit of
commerce, the love of art, science, or literature, or other qualities not

belonging to all of us as men and women.
It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social
distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than the
preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do. We are finding
out that not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism is gentility.
All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery.
The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like
a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crecy
and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his
straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or
leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable