It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than the preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do.  We are finding out that not only “patriotism is eloquence,” but that heroism is gentility.  All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery.  The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crecy and Agincourt.  And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor.

Even our poor “Brahmins,”—­whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles (the same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his supposed antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the “bloated aristocracy,” whereas they are very commonly pallid, undervitalized, shy, sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an aptitude for learning,—­even these poor New England Brahmins of ours, subvirates of an organizable base as they often are, count as full men, if their courage is big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely about their slender figures.

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under our windows.  A few days afterwards a field-piece was dragged to the water’s edge and fired many times over the river.  We asked a bystander, who looked like a fisherman, what that was for.  It was to “break the gall,” he said, and so bring the drowned person to the surface.  A strange physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but that is not our present point.  A good many extraordinary objects do really come to the surface when the great guns of war shake the waters, as when they roared over Charleston harbor.

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable grave.  But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with the waves of prosperity, came up also.  And all sorts of unexpected and unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable not unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary times had died out from among us.  They talked about our own Northern people as the English in the last centuries used to talk about the French,—­Goldsmith’s old soldier, it may be remembered, called one Englishman good for five of them.  As Napoleon spoke of the English, again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,—­forgetting that Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon gold, and Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor of forging iron.