igation in such angry waters, under so stormy a sky.

Turn back the pages of history for two short years, and dwell a moment
on the picture presented to our eyes. A nation, enjoying to the utmost
the substantial benefits belonging to fifty years of profound peace and
unexampled prosperity, enervated by those habits of luxury which wealth
easily accumulated always fosters, with a standing army hardly large
enough to protect our Western frontier from the incursions of hostile
Indians, and a navy ludicrously small in proportion to the extent of our
sea-coast and the value of our commerce, is suddenly plunged into a war
covering such an extent of territory and calling for such an array of
power by sea and land as to dwarf into insignificance all modern wars,
hardly excepting the military operations of Napoleon I.

And it must be remembered that education and habit had trained us to an
implicit reliance on the sufficiency of our laws and the competency of
our Constitution to meet and decide every issue that could possibly be
presented. We could conceive of no public wrongs which could not be
redressed by an appeal to the ballot-box, and of no private injuries for
which our statutes did not provide a suitable remedy.

We were not only a law-abiding, but a peace-loving people. The report of
the revolver was not heard in our streets, nor was the glitter of the
bowie-knife seen in our bar-rooms. We deprecated mob-violence, and
disliked the summary proceedings of Judge Lynch. We took no pains to
conceal our horror of unnecessary bloodshed, and shared the views of
civilized Christendom about duelling. Now and then, to be sure, a
Southerner in one of his sportive moods would stab an inattentive waiter
in some Northern hotel, or a chivalrous son of South Carolina, elegantly
idling away a few years in a New-England university, would shoot some
base-born tutor, or, as an episode in Congressional proceedings, the
member from Arkansas would threaten to pull the nose, spit in the
face, and gouge out the eyes of the (profane participled) sneaking
Yankee,--meaning thereby a quiet, inoffensive member from Massachusetts.
But these incidents of Southern civilization were not frequent enough to
become fashionable. We still clung to our plebeian prejudices against
lawless violence, and persisted in believing that a swaggering bully
could not be an ornament to cultivated and refined society. In fact,
some excellent individuals at the North went