Nations"; and many there were who believed on him, though the great, thieving expedition into Mexico was already well begun. Would as many now believe on a young man of whatever splendid parts, whatever wonderful nobility of face and form, whatever voice of deep-toned melody, who should come believing such things as Charles Sumner believed in 1845, and saying such things as he said? I doubt it very much. I am not sure that good men should desire to have it so. "In our age," he said, "there can be no peace that is not honorable, there can be no war that is not dishonorable." Could he himself say this in 1861, when the war for union and emancipation had actually begun? Lowell had been with him in 1845; but in 1861 he recognized that "the sheathed blade may rust with darker sin," and sang,

"God give us peace, not such as lulls to sleep,

But sword on thigh and brow with purpose knit;
And let our ship of state to anchor sweep,

Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit,

And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap."

Without shedding of blood, there was no remission. Peaceable emancipation would not have cost one-third as much, to say nothing of the loss of life and joy and the long entail of social misery and crime. But peaceable emancipation was impossible. The South did not wish to sell her "divine institution" for mere sordid gold. And so there had to be another war; and there may have to be another yet,―ay, many more down the dark future.

But meantime it is unquestionable that to be "first in peace" is unsatisfactory to a great many people at the present time. I am speaking now without any reference to immediate events. Various factors have contributed to this state of mind. For one thing, a good many have stopped short in the first pages of the history of social evolution; and, because war was formerly a divinity that rough-hewed the ends of social justice, they assume that it must be looked to for the shaping of them to the finest

issues of the present and all coming time. Such would do
well to notice that Spencer, the first of evolutionists, is the
most inflexible antagonist of the military spirit now alive.
Another factor, and a far more general one, in our fighting
temper is the increase of our national strength, and with it
the increased consciousness thereof. Here, too, men learn
by halves, remembering that it is excellent to have a giant's
strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant. Another
factor in this temper is the hope of gain which feeds upon
the recollection of the splendid fortunes that were made by
the army contractors of the war, the nation's torn and bloody
plumage but an opportunity to feather their own nests.
But the principal factor in our altered temper is the ideal-
ization of war in the abstract in the light of our own great
contest and our own glorious victory. If you want to see
the ruddiest flower of this idealization that has bloomed
upon our soil, you must get a late number of the Harvard
Graduates' Magazine, and read Judge Oliver Wendell
Holmes's Harvard Memorial address upon "The Soldier's
Faith."*
It is, as he interprets it, faith in the divine beauty
and eternal necessity of war. "Some teacher of the kind,"
he says, "we all need. In this snug, over-safe corner of the
world we need it, that we may realize that our dull routine
is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of
calm in the midst of the tempestuous, untamed streaming of
the world, and in order that we may be ready for danger."
To have shared "the incommunicable experience of war" is,
he tells us, “to have felt, to still feel, the passion of life to
its top." Given that, and the soldier is content,― content
even to be forgotten in his grave.

"And, when the wind in the tree-tops roared,
The soldier asked from the deep, dark grave,
'Did the banner flutter then?'

'Not so, my hero,' the wind replied:

'The fight is done, but the banner won.

Thy comrades of old have borne it hence,—

* A personal letter from Judge Holmes regrets the coincidence of its publication with the present hue and cry.

Have borne it in triumph hence.'

Then the soldier spoke from the deep, dark grave,
'I am content.'"

'Not so, my hero,' the lovers say:

'We are those that remember not;

For the spring has come, and the earth has smiled,
And the dead must be forgot.'

Then the soldier spoke from the deep, dark grave,
'I am content."

Thank God, our soldiers are not forgotten, and are in no danger of being forgotten, even if they were content to have it so, counting themselves of all men the most fortunate to have died for their country in her hour of sorest need!

It may be that such a passionate idealization of war as that of Judge Holmes is necessary for the instruction of those people who can see only one side of war,—the awful sacrifice of life. No, that is not the word for it: the sacrifice, the voluntary sacrifice, is just exactly what they do not see. They see men killing one another. They do not see the being killed, the gladly being killed, in some great cause. But those are few who have this optical defect. With most people it is just the other way. What makes the literature of war so fascinating to us all is the splendid courage it displays. I almost broke my heart the other day reading a story in which there was a dead soldier lying across the breast of his companion as tragically as Cordelia on the breast of Lear. It was a story of the Franco-Prussian war, and that was one of the most wicked wars that ever choked the course of history with its stream of blood. And the young man had no business to be there, for he was neither French or German; but that didn't make his courage any less. That courage fascinates us all. the boy to his Henty book, the grown man to his "Napier" or "Grant." Sometimes, I am bound to say, the killing part

It is that which draws

is at the fore. It was often so with Robert Louis Stevenson, his reeking shambles burying his native genius out of sight. But, in general, the terrible beauty of war in literature and in the popular imagination is in the "good courages" which it involves. These bulk the vision of the ardent youth or man. They see this side intensely, and they see no other.

And be it far from me to dim by one mis-spoken word the shining of this splendor in your hearts. But let us look at it as eagles at the sun; and is there anything in the history of our own memorable conflict and its subsequent results that should make war as such seem any more desirable to us, any less to be avoided, shunned, and hated than if there had been no Grant or Sherman, no Gettysburg or Shiloh?

We must not forget the splendid courage nor the willing sacrifice. No, we must not. But, then, no more should we forget the horrible details of slaughter, wounds, and death, the shattered limbs, the lacerated flesh, the hospital's slow, weary, wasting agony, and homesick tears in the long watches of the nights that would not tell, the broken lives, the broken hearts and homes. And there are other things which we must not forget. You know, perhaps, the German proverb that every war leaves behind it an army of heroes, an army of cripples, and an army of thieves; and we have had them all. Alas! how many of the heroes under ground, how many of the cripples wishing they had shared their fate! Can we deny the thieves? Is that too harsh a name for the great swarm of human vultures who fattened on our vitals, when we were bound, Prometheus-like, upon our frosty Caucasus? for those who, when the war was over, must find new fields for the rapacity which its sordid opportunities had nourished, forever crying, like the daughters of the vampire, "Give, give!" coming down on the administration of Grant, too generous and unsuspicious for his place,and capturing it by a more subtle strategy than he had encountered on the embattled field? Another obvious legacy of the conflict was the inflation of all business methods, all

standards of prosperity. The modest gains of former times no longer satisfied. Luxury was henceforth the habit of the rich, lavish expenditure the habit of the poor. And then a great war costs so much money, and the expense goes on long after the time when the war-drums throb no longer and the battle flags are furled. Ours costs us every year of late some two hundred and fifty million dollars. The most of it is, no doubt, well spent; but what a drain upon our industrial energies, what a bias on our questions of revenue and taxation! No reasons here for not going to war again to-morrow, if that is the right thing for us to do, but reasons manifold and impressive why we should not go to war if we can abstain from it with honor, why we should not think war a good thing in itself one whit more than we did forty years ago. The vast demoralization of our currency, which to-day hampers our business prosperity, is nothing but one hateful legacy which has come down to us from the artifices to which we were compelled to resort under the stress of war to meet the swelling flood of national liability. These are not merely economical considerations, and, as such, too trivial or sordid to be considered for a moment, when a great crisis thunders at our doors. They are intensely moral. They enter into the every-day morality of every citizen of the United States. They are not beneath contempt, nor even beneath the serious consideration of any man or woman who is trying to think what is true and right and best about the business which is now uppermost in all our thoughts. They prove, I think, that, in despite of our inexpugnable consciousness of the necessity and righteousness and crowning good of our great civil conflict, so far is that experience from making war as such any more beautiful or desirable than it did before, it makes it more hateful than ever, more than ever something to be avoided, if it can be avoided, as the very gate of hell.

What President Cleveland said is true, "There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice,