Thus far nothing has been more remarkable in the history of our civil war than that its signal opportunities have failed to produce on either side any leader who has proved himself to be gifted with this happy faculty.  Even our statesmen seem not to have felt the kindling inspiration of a great occasion.  The country is going through a trial more crucial, if possible, than that of the Revolution; but no state-paper has thus far appeared, comparable in anything but quantity to the documents of our heroic period.  Even Mr. Seward seems to have laid aside his splendid art of generalization, or to have found out the danger of those specious boomerangs of eloquence, which, launched from the platform with the most graceful curves of rhetoric, come back not seldom to deal an untimely blow to him who sets them flying.  The people begin to show signs of impatience that the curtain should be so slow to rise and show them the great actor in our national tragedy.  They are so used to having a gigantic bubble of notoriety blown for them in a week by the newspapers, though it burst in a day or two, leaving but a drop of muddy suds behind it, that they have almost learned to think the making of a great character as simple a matter as that of a great reputation.  Bewildered as they have been with a mob of statesmen, generals, orators, poets, and what not, all of them the foremost of this or any other age, they seem to expect a truly great man on equally easy terms with these cheap miracles of the press,—­grown as rapidly, to be forgotten as soon, as the prize cauliflower of a county show.  We have improvised an army; we have conjured a navy out of nothing so rapidly that pines the jay screamed in last summer may be even now listening for the hum of the hostile shot from Sumter; why not give another rub at our Aladdin’s lamp and improvise a genius and a hero?

This is, perhaps, very natural, but it is nevertheless unreasonable.  Heroes and geniuses are never to be had ready-made, nor was a tolerable specimen of either ever produced at six months’ notice.  Dearly do nations pay for such secular births; still more dearly for their training.  They are commonly rather the slow result than the conscious cause of revolutions in thought or polity.  It is no imputation on democratic forms of government, it is the unexampled prosperity of nearly half a century that is in fault, if a sudden and unforewarned danger finds us without a leader, whether civil or military, whom the people are willing to trust implicitly, and who can in some sense control events by the prestige of a great name.  Carlyle and others have for years been laying to the charge of representative and parliamentary government the same evils whose germ certain British critics, as ignorant of our national character as of our geography, are so kindly ready to find in our democracy.  Mr. Stuart Mill, in his essay on “Liberty,” has convinced us that even the tyranny of Public Opinion is not, as we had hastily supposed, a peculiarly American institution, but is to the full as stringent and as fertile of commonplace in intellect and character under a limited as under a universal system of suffrage.