o its dishonorable
grave. But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with
the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and
unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of
fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed
by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable not
unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary times
had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern people as
the English in the last centuries used to talk about the
French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be remembered, called one
Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English,
again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider
the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,--forgetting that
Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon gold, and
Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor of forging
iron. These persons have learned better now. The bravery of our free
working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not drowned.
The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change
their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer
the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to build
towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute
matter into every shape civilization can ask for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in new
shapes,--that we are one people. It is easy to say that a man is a man
in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our bones
and marrow. The camp is deprovincializing us very fast. Brave Winthrop,
marching with the city elegants, seems to have been a little startled to
find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the Eighth
Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to
do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is distributed
over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to think our own
soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment
of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-ninth, to show us that continental
provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, or of
Broadway, New York.

Here, too, side by side in the same gr