The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864 | Page 6

understand them.
We have certainly found that they do not understand us. We have taken
the stand which every great people is obliged to take soon or late. We
are sufficient for ourselves. Our own national conscience, our own
sense of right and duty, our own public sentiment is our guide
henceforth. By that we stand or fall. By that, and that only, will we
consent that men should judge us. We are a grown-up nation from this
time forth. We answer for ourselves to humanity and the future. We
decide all causes at our own judgment seat.
And there is another good, perhaps larger than this, which we have won,
a good which contains and justifies this moral, national independence:

We have been baptized at last into the family of great nations, by that
red baptism which, from the first, has been the required initiation into
that august brotherhood.
It seems to be the invariable law, of earthly life at least, that humanity
can advance only by the road of suffering. It is so with individuals.
There is no spiritual growth without pain. Prosperity alone never makes
a grand character. Purple and fine linen never clothe the hero. There are
powers and gifts in the soul of man that only come to life and action in
some day of bitterness. There are wells in the heart, whose crystal
waters lie in darkness till some earthquake shakes the man's nature to
its centre, bursts the fountain open, and lets the cooling waters out to
refresh a parched land. There are seeds of noblest fruits that lie latent in
the soul, till some storm of sorrow shakes down tears to moisten, and
some burning sun of scorching pain sends heat to warm them into a
harvest of blessings.
By trouble met and patiently mastered, by suffering endured and
conquered, by trials tested and overcome, so only does a man's soul
grow to manliness.
Now a nation is made up of single men. The law holds for the mass as
for the individuals. It took a thousand years of toil, and war, and
suffering, to make the Europe that we have. It took a thousand years of
wrestle for the very life itself, to build Rome before. To be sure, we
inherited all that this past of agony had bought the world. For us Rome
had lived, fought, toiled, and fallen. For us Celt, Saxon, Norman had
wrought and striven. We started with the accumulated capital of a
hundred generations. It was perhaps natural to suppose we might
escape the hard necessity of our fathers. We might surely profit by their
dear-bought experience. The wrecks, strewn along the shores, would be
effectual warnings to our gallant vessel on the dangerous seas where
they had sailed. In peace, plenty, and prosperity, we might be carried to
the highest reach of national greatness.
Nay! never, unless we give the lie to all the world's experience! There
never was a great nation yet nursed on pap, and swathed in silk. Storms
broke around its rude cradle instead. The tempests rocked the stalwart

child. The dragons came to strangle the baby Hercules in his swaddling
clothes. The magnificent commerce, the increasing manufactures, the
teeming soil, the wealth fast accumulating, they would never have
made us, after all, a great people. They would have eaten the manhood
out of us at last. We were becoming selfish, self-indulgent, sybaritic
rapidly. The nation's muscle was softening, its heart was hardening. If
we were to become a great nation, we needed more than commerce,
more than plenty, more than rapid riches, more than a comfortable,
indulgent life. If we were to be one of the world's great peoples, a
people to dig deep and build strong, a people whose name and fame the
world was to accept as a part of itself, we must look to pay the price
inflexibly demanded at every people's hand, and count it out in sweat
drops, tear drops, blood drops, to the last unit.
We have been patiently counting out this costly currency for three slow
years. I pity the moral outlook of the man who does not see that we
have received largely of our purchase.
From a nation whom the world believed, and whom itself believed, to
be sunk in hopeless mammon worship, we have risen to be a nation that
pours out its wealth like water for a noble purpose. Never again will
'the almighty dollar' be called America's divinity. We were sinking fast
to low aims and selfish purposes, and wise men groaned at national
degeneracy. The summons came, and millions leaped to offer all they
had, to fling fortune, limb, and life on the altar of an unselfish cause.
The dead manhood of the nation sprang to life at the call.