xington and the other Nineteenth of April close to us. War has always
been the mint in which the world's history has been coined, and now
every day or week or month has a new medal for us. It was Warren that
the first impression bore in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth
now, the new face hardly seems fresher than the old. All battle-fields
are alike in their main features. The young fellows who fell in our
earlier struggle seemed like old men to us until within these few
months; now we remember they were like these fiery youth we are cheering
as they go to the fight; it seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside
was crimsoned but yesterday, and the cannon-ball imbedded in the
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