Since things have been hardened, as was the guardsman in the Crimean War who heartlessly wrote home to his mother:  “I do not want to see any more crying letters come to the Crimea from you.  Those I have received I have put into my rifle, after loading it, and have fired them at the Russians, because you appear to have a strong dislike of them.  If you had seen as many killed as I have you would not have as many weak ideas as you now have.”

After the War came a period of great national rejoicing.  I shall never forget, in the summer of 1869, a great national peace jubilee was held in Boston, and DeWitt Moore, an elder of my church, had been honoured by the selection of some of his music to be rendered on that occasion.  I accompanied him to the jubilee.  Forty thousand people sat and stood in the great Colosseum erected for that purpose.  Thousands of wind and stringed instruments; twelve thousand trained voices!  The masterpieces of all ages rendered, hour after hour, and day after day—­Handel’s “Judas Maccabaeus,” Spohr’s “Last Judgment,” Beethoven’s “Mount of Olives,” Haydn’s “Creation,” Mendelssohn’s “Elijah,” Meyerbeer’s “Coronation March,” rolling on and up in surges that billowed against the heavens!  The mighty cadences within were accompanied on the outside by the ringing of the bells of the city, and cannon on the common, in exact time with the music, discharged by electricity, thundering their awful bars of a harmony that astounded all nations.  Sometimes I bowed my head and wept.  Sometimes I stood up in the enchantment, and sometimes the effect was so overpowering I felt I could not endure it.

When all the voices were in full chorus, and all the batons in full wave, and all the orchestra in full triumph, and a hundred anvils under mighty hammers were in full clang, and all the towers of the city rolled in their majestic sweetness, and the whole building quaked with the boom of thirty cannon, Parepa Rosa, with a voice that will never again be equalled on earth until the archangelic voice proclaims that time shall be no longer, rose above all other sounds in her rendering of our national air, the “Star Spangled Banner.”  It was too much for a mortal, and quite enough for an immortal, to hear:  and while some fainted, one womanly spirit, released under its power, sped away to be with God.  It was a marvel of human emotion in patriotic frenzy.

Immediately following the Civil War there was a great wave of intemperance, and bribery swept over our land.  The temptation to intemperance in public places grew more and more terrific.  Of the men who were prominent in political circles but few died respectably.  The majority among them died of delirium tremens.  The doctor usually fixed up the case for the newspapers, and in his report to them it was usually gout, or rheumatism, or obstruction of the liver, or exhaustion from patriotic services—­but we all knew it was whiskey.  That which smote the villain