“Cursed mountain, mountain white! 
  Upon thee was crushed our might;
  What in thee lies covered o’er
  Ages cannot back restore.”

If there had been a Bohemian people, preserving a real vital tendency, the Battle of the White Mountain would have resulted differently, even had it been a defeat.

Other patriots, cultivated enough to be Panslavists, indulge a more cheerful vein.  They see a good time coming, and raise the cry of Hej Slovane!

  “Hey, Slavonians! our Slavonic language still is living,
  Long as our true loyal heart is for our nation striving;
  Lives, lives the Slavonic spirit, and ’t will live forever: 
  Hell and thunder! vain against us all your rage shall shiver.”

This is nothing but a frontier feeling.  The true Slavonic centre is at St. Petersburg; thence will roll a people and a language over all kindred ground.]

After all, then, we must carefully discover what a war was about, before we can trace it, either for good or for evil, into the subsequent life of a nation.  There can be no such thing as exhaustion or deterioration, if the eternal laws have won the laurel of a fight; for they are fountains of youth, from which new blood comes rushing through the depleted veins.  And it soon mantles on the surface, to mend the financial and industrial distress.  Its blush of pride and victory announces no heady passion.  It is the signal which Truth waves from the hearts of her children.

If we wish directly to consider the effect of war upon our own intellectual development, we must begin by asking what ideas of consequence are suggested by our copious use of the word Country.  What a phrase is that—­Our Country—­which we have been accustomed for eighty years to use upon all festivals that commemorate civic rights, with flattering and pompous hopes!  We never understood what it meant, till this moment which threatens to deprive us of the ideas and privileges which it really represents.  We never appreciated till now its depth and preciousness.  Orators have built up, sentence by sentence, a magnificent estimate of the elements which make our material success, and they thought it was a patriotic chord which they touched with the climax of their fine periods.  It was such patriotism as thrives in the midst of content and satisfactory circumstances, which loves to have an inventory made of all the fixtures and conveniences and the crude splendor of a country’s housekeeping,—­things which are not indeed to be despised, for they show what a people can do when cast upon their own resources, at a distance from Governmental interference, free to select their own way of living, to be fervent in business, in charities, in the cause of education, in the explorations which lay open new regions to the emigration of a world, in the inventiveness which gives labor new pursuits and increases the chances of poor men, in the enterprise which has made foundries, mines,