These persons have learned better now.  The bravery of our free working-people was overlaid, but not smothered, sunken, but not drowned.  The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to build towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute matter into every shape civilization can ask for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in new shapes,—­that we are one people.  It is easy to say that a man is a man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our bones and marrow.  The camp is deprovincializing us very fast.  Poor Winthrop, marching with the city elegants, seems almost to have been astonished to find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the Eighth Massachusetts.  It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is distributed over its surface.  And then, just as we are beginning to think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-Ninth, to show us that continental provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, or of Broadway, New York.

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief.  When the masked battery opens, does the “Baptist” Lieutenant believe in his heart that God takes better care of him than of his “Congregationalist” Colonel?  Does any man really suppose, that, of a score of noble young fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country, the Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss, and the Homoiousians translated from the battle-field to the abodes of everlasting woe?  War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not be.  He must not be a bigot and a fool in the presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls to battle, and where a man should have but two thoughts:  to do his duty, and trust his Maker.  Let our brave dead come back from the fields where they have fallen for law and liberty, and if you will follow them to their graves, you will find out what the Broad Church means; the narrow church is sparing of its exclusive formulae over the coffins wrapped in the flag which the fallen heroes had defended!  Very little comparatively do we hear at such times of the dogmas on which men differ; very much of the faith and trust in which all sincere Christians can agree.  It is a noble lesson, and nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can teach it so that it shall be heard over all the angry voices of theological disputants.