church-tower would feel warm, if we
laid our hand upon it.

Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from
earliest time to our own day, where Right and Wrong have grappled, are
but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs upon the
field of conflict. The issues seem to vary, but it is always a right
against a claim, and, however the struggle of the hour may go, a movement
onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well as victory to serve its
mighty ends. The very implements of our warfare change less than we
think. Our bullets and cannonballs have lengthened into bolts like those
which whistled out of old arbalests. Our soldiers fight with weapons,
such as are pictured on the walls of Theban tombs, wearing a newly
invented head-gear as old as the days of the Pyramids.

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and, we
trust, better. Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our narrowness,
our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and shame. Better,
because all that is noble in men and women is demanded by the time, and
our people are rising to the standard the time calls for. For this is
the question the hour is putting to each of us: Are you ready, if need
be, to sacrifice all that you have and hope for in this world, that the
generations to follow you may inherit a whole country whose natural
condition shall be peace, and not a broken province which must live under
the perpetual threat, if not in the constant presence, of war and all
that war brings with it? If we are all ready for this sacrifice, battles
may be lost, but the campaign and its grand object must be won.

Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions to mortals. We are
not abruptly asked to give up all that we most care for, in view of the
momentous issues before us. Perhaps we shall never be asked to give up
all, but we have already been called upon to part with much that is dear
to us, and should be ready to yield the rest as it is called for. The
time may come when even the cheap public print shall be a burden our
means cannot support, and we can only listen in the square that was once
the marketplace to the voices of those who proclaim defeat or victory.
Then there will be only our daily food left. When we have nothing to
read and nothing to eat, it will be a favorable moment to offer a
compromise. At present we have all that nature absolutely demands,--we