nerosity and forbearance of a great people,
the constant calls for the exercise of the noblest qualities, the most
self-sacrificing devotion, and that too in support of a great principle
rather than of any present material interest, the very necessity for an
exalted civilization and intellectual development on the part of the
masses, which shall enable them to see in that principle the groundwork
of all their future well-being, both as regards material prosperity and
political position, are constantly bringing before the people, in a
clearer light than ever before, the blessings of honor and uprightness,
the necessity of national purity, and developing a moral element in our
midst, whose good effects will far outbalance the ephemeral and
spasmodic immorality and vice which a state of war usually engenders.
Our people are _becoming acquainted_ with those blessings of individual
well-doing and those principles of philanthropy to which they have for
so long been comparative strangers. And it is this, together with the
unveiling, through the present convulsion, of those errors, both in our
political system and in our society, which have so nearly proved our
ruin, which will make this war in very truth the greatest blessing that
has ever befallen us. And if this moral progress shall be such and so
great as to throw down the golden calf from his throne and make the
place of honor the reward of true merit alone, then shall we have cause,
for the remotest generations, to thank God for this seeming calamity
which has fallen upon us.

And these same facts, standing out as shining lights in the darkness,
tend to show that we are, after all, not quite so sordid as we seem;
that, with all our worship of the money god, there is yet, away down in
the great American heart, a wealth of strong, true, generous feeling,
ready at the first call of sorrow and of suffering to spring forth and
scatter its golden blessings even beyond the seas. It is not alone that,
years ago, when we were at peace and at the height of prosperity, many
ships left our shores laden down with food, the voluntary contributions
of the American citizen to his starving brethren of the Emerald Isle;
though this of itself was enough to place our civilization on a level
with that of the most polished nation of the Old World. But even now,
when we are struggling for our very existence, when every energy and
every material resource is being exerted to stem the tide of inter