ivil War did in large
measure for the Americans. Even the struggle with their own wilderness
might not have sufficed to keep the people hard and sound of heart and
limb through a century of peace and growing prosperity. The Civil War is
already beginning to slip into the farther reaches of the people's
memory; but twenty-five years ago the echoes of the guns had hardly died
away--the minds of the people were still inspired. It was an awful, and
a splendid, experience for the nation. It is not necessary, with
Emerson, "always to respect war hereafter"; but there have been times
when it has seemed to me that I would rather be able to wear that little
tri-colour button of the American Loyal Legion than any other
decoration in the world.[189:1]

It is the great compensation of war that it does not breed in a people
only a fighting spirit. All history shows that it is in the mental
exhilaration and the moral uplift after a period of war successfully
waged that a people puts forth the best that is in it, in the production
of works of art and in its literature. It is an old legend--older than
Omar--that the most beautiful flowers spring from the blood of heroes.
And it is true. When the genius of a nation has been ploughed up with
cannon-shot and bayonets and watered with blood--then it is that it
breaks into the most nearly perfect blossom. It has been so through all
history, back beyond the times of gun and bayonet, when spears and
swords were the plough-shares, as far as we can see and doubtless
farther. In America, the necessities of the case compelled the people to
turn first to material works; it was to the civilising of their
continent, the repairing of their shattered commercial and industrial
structure (shattered when it was yet only half built), that their new
inspiration had perforce to turn first. But there was impetus enough for
that and to spare, and, after satisfying their mere physical needs, they
swept on with a sort of inspired hunger for things to satisfy their
minds and souls. Europeans are accustomed to think that the American
desire for culture is something superficial--something put on for
appearance's sake; and nothing could well be farther from the truth. It
is an intense, deep-seated, national craving. War on the scale of the
Civil War ploughs deep. It may be impossible for a nation to make itself
cultivated--to grow century-old shrubberies and five-century-old
turf--in ten years or forty; and when th