or
forging the name of a buried father to a note and then allowing it to
go to protest,--it is idle to talk of these as the extreme of criminal
heartlessness: the men who could thus trade--the men who _have_ thus
traded, during the whole war--on the public patriotism and the public
necessity, would deserve the lowest deep in the pit of perdition,
following upon leprosy in life and deaths on dunghills--if there was not
a still deeper guilt on the souls of those who first plunged the country
into war and then murdered it by treason or inefficiency.[7]

[Footnote 7: January 17th, 1863.]

The public disgust at these "shoulder-straps" of both classes culminated
during the first week of July. It might be unpatriotic and even cowardly
to make no movement towards joining the Army of the Union: it was base
and utterly contemptible to make such a movement merely as an injurious
sham. So thought the people--seeing in this _desire of military
reputation and profit without service or sacrifice_, the worm gnawing at
the very heart of the republic. "If they are not soldiers, why do they
wear these trappings of the battle-field?" asked the public. "If they
are soldiers, why are they loitering here when their comrades are being
overpowered and slaughtered?" Alas! the question has been continually
asked and never answered. "Leipsic was lost, and I not there!" cried the
soldier of the old French Eleventh, bursting into tears. But: "All the
great battles of this war have been fought, and I have managed to keep
out of them!" might the shoulder-strapped, belted, fatigue-capped,
strutting mock-soldier of our own time say with a corresponding chuckle.
God help us!--Rome had but one Nero fiddling when it burned, if history
tells us true: we have had ten thousand military fiddlers playing away
to admiring audiences during _our_ conflagration!

Is this to be a wholesale attack, then, on our national courage? Had we
no brave men, then, that only these apologies for men are exhibited?
Yes!--thousand upon thousand of brave men, and hundred upon hundred of
brave officers--the world over no better or truer! But they were, as
they _are_, the men of action, not of _show_, or at least not of show
_alone_.

One incident of the morning of the Second of July, when the Seven Days
Battles were yet in progress before Richmond, will at once supply a few
figures for this background, and an illustration of the public feeling
for the soldiers of the little arm