s. He can turn an honest penny,
and a good many of them. He need not refuse to do himself a good turn
with his left hand, while he is doing his country a good turn with his
right. It is all fair and aboveboard. He does the business assigned
him, and does it well. He takes no more compensation than the law
allows. The money may as well go to him as to shoddy contractors,
Shylock sutlers, and the legion of plebeian rascals. But it was a good
stroke. It was a great chance. It was a rare success.

O wretched failure! O pitiful abortion! O accursed hunger for gold!
When the nation struggles in a death-agony, when her life-blood is
poured out from hundreds of noble hearts, when men and women and
children are sending up to the Lord the incense of daily sacrifice in
her behalf, and we know not yet whether prayer and effort, whether
faith and works, shall avail,--whether our lost birthright, sought
carefully, and with tears, shall be restored to us once more,--in this
solemn and awful hour, a man can close his eyes and ears to the fearful
sights and great signs in the heavens, and, stooping earthward, delve
with his muck-rake in the gutter for the paltry pennies! A man? A MAN!
Is this manhood? Is this manliness? Is this the race that our
institutions engender? Is this the best production which we have a
right to expect? Is this the result which Christianity and
civilization combine to offer? Is this the advantage which the
nineteenth century claims over its predecessors? Is this the flower of
all the ages,--earth's last, best gift to heaven?

No,--no,--no,--this is a changeling, and no child. The true brother's
blood cries to us from Baltimore. It rings out from the East where
Winthrop fell. It swells up from the West with Lyon's dirge. And all
along, from hill and valley and river-depths, where the soil is
drenched, and the waters are reddened, and nameless graves are
scattered,--cleaving clearly through the rattle of musketry, mingling
grandly with the "diapason of the cannonade," or floating softly up
under the silent stars, "the thrilling, solemn, proud, pathetic voice"
ceases not to cry unto us day and night; its echoes linger tenderly and
tearfully around every hearth-stone, and vibrate with a royal resonance
from mountain to sea-shore. The mother bends to it in her silent
watches. The soldier, tempest-tost, hears it through the creaking
cordage, and every true heart knows its brother, and takes up