ign foes; they always dwell within
their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always
in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in
whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts
without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting
reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between
parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and
preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such
nations have no need of wars to save them. Their accounts with
righteousness are always even; and God's judgments do not have to
overtake them fitfully in bloody spasms and convulsions of the race.

The lesson that our war ought most of all to teach us is the lesson
that evils must be checked in time, before they grow so great. The
Almighty cannot love such long-postponed accounts, or such tremendous
settlements. And surely He hates all settlements that do such
quantities of incidental devils' work. Our present situation, with its
rancors and delusions, what is it but the direct outcome of the added
powers of government, the corruptions and inflations of the war? Every
war leaves such miserable legacies, fatal seeds of future war and
revolution, unless the civic virtues of the people save the State in
time.

Robert Shaw had both kinds of virtue. As he then led his regiment
against Fort Wagner, so surely would he now be leading us against all
lesser powers of darkness, had his sweet young life been spared. You
think of many as I speak of one. For, North and South, how many lives
as sweet, unmonumented for the most part, commemorated solely in the
hearts of mourning mothers, widowed brides, or friends did the
inexorable war mow down! Instead of the full years of natural service
from so many of her children, our country counts but their poor
memories, "the tender grace of a day that is dead," lingering like
echoes of past music on the vacant air.

But so and so only was it written that she should grow sound again.
From that fatal earlier unsoundness those lives have brought for North
and South together permanent release. The warfare is accomplished; the
iniquity is pardoned. No future problem can be like that problem. No
task laid on our children can compare in difficulty with the task with
which their fathers had to deal. Yet as we face the future, tasks
enough await us. The republic to which Robert Shaw