We had almost forgotten the meaning and use of the machinery of destruction.  We had come to look upon our fortresses as the ornaments, rather than as the defences of our harbors.  Our war-ships were the Government’s yacht-squadron, our arsenals museums for the entertainment of peaceful visitors.  The roar of cannon has roused us from this Arcadian dream.  A ship of the line, we said, reproachfully, costs as much as a college; but we are finding out that its masts are a part of the fence round the college.  The Springfield Arsenal inspired a noble poem; but that, as we are learning, was not all it was meant for.  What poets would be born to us in the future without the “placida quies” which “sub libertate” the sword alone can secure for our children?

It is all plain, but it has been an astonishment to us, as our war-comet was to the astronomers.  The comet, as some of them say, brushed us with its tail as it passed; yet nobody finds us the worse for it.  So, too, we have been brushed lightly by mishap, as we ought to have been, and as we ought to have prayed to be, no doubt, if we had known what was good for us; yet at this very moment we stand stronger, more hopeful, more united than ever before in our history.

Misfortunes are no new things; yet a man suffering from furuncles will often speak as if Job had never known anything about them.  We will take up a book lying by us, and find all the evils, or most of those we have been complaining of, described in detail, as they happened eight or ten generations before our time.

It was in “a struggle for NATIONAL independence, liberty of conscience, freedom of the seas, against sacerdotal and world-absorbing tyranny.”  A plotting despot is at the bottom of it.  “While the riches of the Indies continue, he thinketh he will be able to weary out all other princes.”  But England had soldiers and statesmen ready to fight, even though “Indies”—­the King Cotton of that day—­were declared arbiter of the contest.  “I pray God,” said one of them, “that I live not to see this enterprise quail, and with it the utter subversion of religion throughout Christendom.”—­“The war doth defend England.  Who is he that will refuse to spend his life and living in it?  If her Majesty consume twenty thousand men in the cause, the experimented men that will remain will double that strength to the realm.”—­"The freehold of England will be worth but little, if this action quail; and therefore I wish no subject to spare his purse towards it.”—­“God hath stirred up this action to be a school to breed up soldiers to defend the freedom of England, which through these long times of peace and quietness is brought into a most dangerous estate, if it should be attempted.  Our delicacy is such that we are already weary; yet this journey is nought in respect to the misery and hardship that soldiers must and do endure.”