have gone shamefully out, and some are lurid with a baleful glare.  But unto this end were we born, and for this cause came we into the world.  When shall greatness of soul stand forth, if not in evil times?  When the skies are fair and the seas smooth, all ships sail festively.  But the clouds lower, the winds shriek, the waves boil, and immediately each craft shows its quality.  The deep is strown with broken masts, parted keels, floating wrecks; but here and there a ship rides the raging sea, and flings defiance to the wind.  She overlives the sea because she is sea-worthy.  Not our eighty years of peace alone, but our two years of war are the touchstone of our character.  We have rolled our Democracy as a sweet morsel under our tongue; we have gloried in the prosperity which it brought to the individual; but if the comforts of men minister to the degradation of man, if Democracy levels down and does not level up, if our era of peace and plenty leaves us so feeble and frivolous, so childish, so impatient, so deaf to all that calls to us from the past and entreats us in the future, that we faint and fail under the stress of our one short effort, then indeed is our Democracy our shame and curse.  Let us show now what manner of people we are.  Let us be clear-sighted and far-sighted to see how great is the issue that hangs upon the occasion.  It is not a mere military reputation that is at stake, not the decay of a generation’s commerce, not the determination of this or that party to power.  It is the question of the world that we have been set to answer.  In the great conflict of ages, the long strife between right and wrong, between progress and sluggardy, through the Providence of God we are placed in the van-guard.  Three hundred years ago a world was unfolded for the battle-ground.  Choice spirits came hither to level and intrench.  Swords clashed and blood flowed, and the great reconnoissance was successfully made.  Since then both sides have been gathering strength, marshalling forces, planting batteries, and to-day we stand in the thick of the fray.  Shall we fail?  Men and women of America, will you fail?  Shall the cause go by default?  When a great Idea, that has been uplifted on the shoulders of generations, comes now to its Thermopylae, its glory-gate, and needs only stout hearts for its strong hands,—­when the eyes of a great multitude are turned upon you, and the fates of dumb millions in the silent future rest with you,—­when the suffering and sorrowful, the lowly, whose immortal hunger for justice gnaws at their hearts, who blindly see, but keenly feel, by their God-given instincts, that somehow you are working out their salvation, and the high-born, monarchs in the domain of mind, who, standing far off, see with prophetic eye the two courses that lie before you, one to the Uplands of vindicated Right, one to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, alike fasten upon you their hopes, their prayers, their tears,—­will you, for a moment’s bodily comfort and rest