intelligible the delays and reverses which our national cause
suffered. In short the women of the country were through the whole
conflict, not only not softening the fibres of war, but they were
actually strengthening its sinews by keeping up their own courage and
that of their households, under the inspiration of the larger and more
public life, the broader work and greater field for enterprise and
self-sacrifice afforded them by their direct labors for the benefit of
the soldiers. They drew thousands of lukewarm, or calculating, or
self-saving men into the support of the national cause by their
practical enthusiasm and devotion. They proved what has again and again
been demonstrated, that what the women of a country resolve shall be
done, will and must be done. They shamed recruits into the ranks, and
made it almost impossible for deserters, or cowards, or malingerers to
come home; they emptied the pockets of social idlers, or wealthy drones,
into the treasuries of the Aid Societies; and they compelled the shops
and domestic trade of all cities to be favorable to the war. The
American women were nearer right and more thoroughly united by this
means, and their own healthier instincts, than the American men. The
Army, whose bayonets were glittering needles, advanced with more
unbroken ranks, and exerted almost a greater moral force than the army
that carried loaded muskets.

The Aid Societies and the direct oversight the women sought to give the
men in the field, very much increased the reason for correspondence
between the homes and the tents.

The women were proud to write what those at the hearth-stone were doing
for those who tended the camp-fires, and the men were happy and cheery
to acknowledge the support they received from this home sympathy. The
immense correspondence between the army and the homes, prodigious beyond
belief as it was, some regiments sending home a thousand letters a week,
and receiving as many more back; the constant transmission to the men of
newspapers, full of the records of home work and army news, produced a
homogeneousness of feeling between the soldiers and the citizens, which
kept the men in the field, civilians, and made the people at home, of
both sexes, half-soldiers.

Thus there never grew up in the army any purely military and anti-social
or anti-civil sentiments. The soldiers studied and appreciated all the
time the moral causes of the War, and were acquainted with the political