“It will never do for us to be beaten,” said the Duke at Waterloo; “think what they will say of us at home!”—­and this simple sentence went straight to the heart of every man who heard.  What they will say at home is the prevailing thought in each young soldier’s heart as he goes into his first fight.  And “home” does not mean for him so much broad England as it does the little hamlet where he was born, the school where he was trained, the county in which his forefathers were honored in times gone by.  He thinks of his name, henceforward linked with a glorious victory! whispered around among the groups who linger in the church-yard after the morning service.  He trusts, that, if he fall nobly, there will be for him the memorial window through whose blazoned panes the sunlight will fall softly across the “squire’s pew,” where as a boy he knelt and worshipped, or touch with a crimson and azure gleam the marble effigies of his knightly sires recumbent on their tombs.  Or he thinks of a place among the lettered names high up on the old oaken wall of the school-room at Winchester or Harrow or Westminster,—­that future boys, playing where he played, shall talk of him whom they never knew as “one of ours.”  For he is well aware that he is making fame not for himself alone, but to be prized where he himself has been most loved and happiest.

We, in this new land of ours, have but a very faint experience of the intense working of such influences upon a people in whom the local association and sentiment are ingrained.  We are but just beginning where Englishmen began eight centuries and more ago.  Hence our glorifying of the past has been a little indiscriminate, and withal has sought to commemorate events more than individuals.  But the last two years have taken us through one of those great periods which, in their concentrated energy, compress the work of years into days, and which mark the water-sheds of history.  The United States of 1865 will be as unlike the same land in 1855 as the youth is unlike the child.  Life is measured by action, not duration.  The brilliant epoch of the first Persian invasion was more to Greece than its slumbering centuries under Turkish rule, and “fifty years of Europe” more “than a cycle of Cathay.”  We shall look back upon a past.  We shall have a truly national existence.  It will be but natural, as it will be most wise, that we take heed of those elements which have ever been so potent in strengthening national character.  One of these has been briefly hinted at above.  Yet it may be undesirable to perpetuate the memory of events in which the whole country cannot participate, which will not for the remainder of this century be thought of by one section without shame and confusion of face, and which will only tend to keep alive the sad old jealousies and hates.  We shall be very loath to place our monumental columns upon the fields of Antietam and Gettysburg.  We should not tolerate them upon the slopes of Manassas