duty.  We make a great mistake if we suppose it is a feeling of ferocity that sets these men tramping about in gorgeous uniform, in mud or dust, in rain or under a broiling sun.  They have no desire to kill anybody.  Out of these resplendent clothes they are much like other people; only they have a nobler spirit, that which leads them to endure hardships for the sake of pleasing others.  They differ in degree, though not in kind, from those orders, for keeping secrets, or for encouraging a distaste for strong drink, which also wear bright and attractive regalia, and go about in processions, with banners and music, and a pomp that cannot be distinguished at a distance from real war.  It is very fortunate that men do like to march about in ranks and lines, even without any distinguishing apparel.  The Drawer has seen hundreds of citizens in a body, going about the country on an excursion, parading through town after town, with no other distinction of dress than a uniform high white hat, who carried joy and delight wherever they went.  The good of this display cannot be reckoned in figures.  Even a funeral is comparatively dull without the military band and the four-and-four processions, and the cities where these resplendent corteges of woes are of daily occurrence are cheerful cities.  The brass band itself, when we consider it philosophically, is one of the most striking things in our civilization.  We admire its commonly splendid clothes, its drums and cymbals and braying brass, but it is the impartial spirit with which it lends itself to our varying wants that distinguishes it.  It will not do to say that it has no principles, for nobody has so many, or is so impartial in exercising them.  It is equally ready to play at a festival or a funeral, a picnic or an encampment, for the sons of war or the sons of temperance, and it is equally willing to express the feeling of a Democratic meeting or a Republican gathering, and impartially blows out “Dixie” or “Marching through Georgia,” “The Girl I Left Behind Me” or “My Country, ’tis of Thee.”  It is equally piercing and exciting for St. Patrick or the Fourth of July.

There are cynics who think it strange that men are willing to dress up in fantastic uniform and regalia and march about in sun and rain to make a holiday for their countrymen, but the cynics are ungrateful, and fail to credit human nature with its trait of self-sacrifice, and they do not at all comprehend our civilization.  It was doubted at one time whether the freedman and the colored man generally in the republic was capable of the higher civilization.  This doubt has all been removed.  No other race takes more kindly to martial and civic display than it.  No one has a greater passion for societies and uniforms and regalias and banners, and the pomp of marchings and processions and peaceful war.  The negro naturally inclines to the picturesque, to the flamboyant, to vivid colors and the trappings of office that give a man distinction.  He delights