se not called for, because not
needed. Moreover, private benevolence is apt at such times to become
less active, and, for the same reason, that is to say, because less
of it is required.

This state of things is seized upon by those who are eager to put the
worst possible construction on human nature and human conduct, as
evidence of extreme degeneracy. How often are we to be told that our
present troubles are sent upon us in order to lift the whole community
out of the mire of money-getting propensities, where every thing like
public spirit was in danger of being swallowed up and lost? I protest
against this wholesale abuse of what has been,--at best, a gross
exaggeration. The whole truth in this matter is told in a few words.
By constitution, by habit, by circumstances, our people are intensely
active; and this activity, for want of other objects, has been turned
into the channels of material prosperity. If, therefore, you merely
affirm their excessive eagerness in acquisition, I grant it; but if,
not content with this, you go on to charge them with being niggards in
expending what they have acquired, I deny it, emphatically, utterly.
Read the history of what has been done in this commonwealth, in this
city, during the last twenty-five years for humanity, for education,
for science and the arts, for every form of public use or human need,
and then say, if you can, that public spirit has been dying out. Our
people have never been otherwise than public spirited, and hence the
promptness and unanimity of their response to this new call to public
duty. Hence also our confidence in it,--not as an excitement merely,
which a day has made, and a day may unmake, but as an expression of
character.

Let us, however, be just to the excitement itself, considered as the
sudden and spontaneous uprising of a whole community to sustain the
government. We need demonstrations of this kind, from time to time,
to reassure us that all men have souls. It is worth a great deal
merely as an experiment, on a large scale, to prove that the moral and
social instincts are as much a part of human nature as the selfish
instincts. But he must be a superficial observer who can see nothing
in this vast movement but the play of instincts. It is a great moral
force.

Not a little of what passes for loyalty or patriotism in other
countries is blind impulse, growing out of mere attachment to the
soil, or the power of custom, or a helpless feeling of d