id look of individuality due
to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that
by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were
those leaden-footed hours and years. The photographs themselves
erelong will fade utterly, and books of history and monuments like this
alone will tell the tale. The great war for the Union will be like the
siege of Troy; it will have taken its place amongst all other "old,
unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago."

In all such events two things must be distinguished--the moral service
of them from the fortitude which they display. War has been much
praised and celebrated among us of late as a school of manly virtue;
but it is easy to exaggerate upon this point. Ages ago, war was the
gory cradle of mankind, the grim-featured nurse that alone could train
our savage progenitors into some semblance of social virtue, teach them
to be faithful one to another, and force them to sink their selfishness
in wider tribal ends. War still excels in this prerogative; and
whether it be paid in years of service, in treasure, or in life-blood,
the war tax is still the only tax that men ungrudgingly will pay. How
could it be otherwise, when the survivors of one successful massacre
after another are the beings from whose loins we and all our
contemporary races spring? Man is once for all a fighting animal;
centuries of peaceful history could not breed the battle-instinct out
of us; and our pugnacity is the virtue least in need of reinforcement
by reflection, least in need of orator's or poet's help.

What we really need the poet's and orator's help to keep alive in us is
not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed
when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more
lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in
the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the
Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it
in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of
nations should most of all be reared, for the survival of the fittest
has not bred it into the bone of human beings as it has bred military
valor; and of five hundred of us who could storm a battery side by side
with others, perhaps not one would be found ready to risk his worldly
fortunes all alone in resisting an enthroned abuse. The deadliest
enemies of nations are not their fore