The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864 | Page 8

but on the
truer test of our manhood, truth, and steadfastness. We stand justified at
the bar of our own conscience, for national pride and self-reliance, as
we shall infallibly be justified at the bar of the world.
Is this lifting up of a great people nothing? Is this placing of twenty
millions on the clear ground of unselfish duty, as life's motive, nothing?
Is there one of us, to-day, who is not prouder of his nation and its
character, in the midst of its desperate tug for life, than he ever was in
the day of its envied prosperity? And when he considers how the nation
has answered to its hard necessity, how it has borne itself in its sore
trial, is he not clear of all doubt about its vitality and continuance? And
is that, also, nothing?

But besides this education in the stern, rude, heroic virtues that prop a
people's life, there has been an education in some others, which, though
apparently opposed, are really kindred. Unselfish courage is noble, but
always with the highest courage there lives a great pity and tenderness.
The brave man is always soft hearted. The most courageous people are
the tenderest people. The highest manhood dwells with the highest
womanhood.
So the heart of the nation has been touched and softened, while its
muscles have been steeled. While it has grasped the sword, it has
grasped it weeping in infinite pity. It has recognized the truth of human
brotherhood as it never did before. All ranks have been drawn together
in mutual sympathy. All barriers, that hedge brethren apart, have been
broken down in the common suffering.
News comes, to-day, that a great battle has been fought, and wounded
thousands of our brothers need aid and care. You tell the news in any
city or hamlet in the land, and hands are opened, purses emptied, stores
ransacked for comforts for the suffering, and gentle women, in
hundreds, are ready to tend them as they would their own. Is this no
gain? Is it nothing that the selfishness of us all has been broken up as
by an earthquake, and that kindness, charity, and pity to the sick and
needy have become the law of our lives? Count the millions that have
streamed forth from a people whose heart has been touched by a
common suffering, in kindness to wounded and sick soldiers and to
their needy families! Benevolence has become the atmosphere of the
land.
Four years ago we could not have believed it. That the voluntary
charity of Americans would count by millions yearly, would flow out
in a steady, deep, increasing tide, that giving would be the rule, free,
glad giving, and refusing the marked exception, the world would not
have believed it, we would not have believed it ourselves. Is this
nothing?
We will think more of each other also for all this. We will love and
honor each other better. Under the awful pressure of the Hand that lies
upon us so heavily, we are brought into closer knowledge and closer

sympathy. The blows of battle are welding us into one. Fragments of all
people, and all races, cast here by the waves, and strangers to each
other, with a hundred repulsions and separations, even to language,
religions, and morals, the furnace heat of our trial is fusing all parts into
one strong, united whole. We are driven and drawn together by the sore
need that is upon us, and as Americans are forgetting all else. The civil
war is making us a people--the American People. We are no longer 'the
loose sweepings of all lands,' as they called us. We are one, now,
brethren all in the sacrament of a great sorrow.
And is this nothing?
And these goods and gains are permanent. They do not belong to this
generation only, or to this time exclusively. After all, the nation is
mainly an educator. These things remain, as parts of its moral influence
in moulding and training. And here is their infinite value. Independence,
courage, patience, fortitude, nobleness, self-sacrifice, and tenderness
become the national ethics. These things are pressed home on all
growing minds. Coming generations are to be educated in these, by the
example of the present. We are stamping these things, as the essentials
of the national character, on the ages to come.
A thousand years of prosperity will have no power of this kind. What is
there in Chinese history to elevate a Chinaman? What high, heroic
experience to educate him, in her long centuries of ignoble peace? The
training power of a nation is acquired always in the crises of its history.
In the day when it rises to fight for its life, the typal men, who give it
the lasting models of its