Destiny visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of
her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the last three years;
never has any shown itself stronger; and never could that strength be
so directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of the people,--to
that general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion
possible only under the influence of a political framework like our
own. We find it hard to understand how even a foreigner should be blind
to the grandeur of the combat of ideas that has been going on here,--to
the heroic energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving
that it knows how much dearer greatness is than mere power; and we own
that it is impossible for us to conceive the mental and moral condition
of the American who does not feel his spirit braced and heightened by
being even a spectator of such qualities and achievements. That a
steady purpose and a definite aim have been given to the jarring forces
which, at the beginning of the war, spent themselves in the discussion
of schemes which could only become operative, if at all, after the war
was over; that a popular excitement has been slowly intensified into an
earnest national will; that a somewhat impracticable moral sentiment
has been made the unconscious instrument of a practical moral end; that
the treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal
of friends, have been made not only useless for mischief, but even
useful for good; that the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the
horrors of civil conflict has been prevented from complicating a
domestic with a foreign war;--all these results, any one of which might
suffice to prove greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good
sense, the good-humor, the sagacity, the large--mindedness, and the
unselfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as it
seemed, had lifted from the crowd to the most dangerous and difficult
eminence of modern times. It is by presence of mind in untried
emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested; it is by the
sagacity to see, and the fearless honesty to admit, whatever of truth
there may be in an adverse opinion, in order more convincingly to
expose the fallacy that lurks behind it, that a reasoner at length
gains for his mere statement of a fact the force of argument; it is by
a wise forecast which allows host