It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable not unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary times had died out from among us.  They talked about our own Northern people as the English in the last centuries used to talk about the French,—­Goldsmith’s old soldier, it may be remembered, called one Englishman good for five of them.  As Napoleon spoke of the English, again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,—­forgetting that Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon gold, and Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor of forging iron.  These persons have learned better now.  The bravery of our free working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not drowned.  The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to build towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute matter into every shape civilization can ask for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in new shapes,—­that we are one people.  It is easy to say that a man is a man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our bones and marrow.  The camp is deprovincializing us very fast.  Brave Winthrop, marching with the city elegants, seems to have been a little startled to find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the Eighth Massachusetts.  It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is distributed over its surface.  And then, just as we are beginning to think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-ninth, to show us that continental provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, or of Broadway, New York.

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief.  When the masked battery opens, does the “Baptist” Lieutenant believe in his heart that God takes better care of him than of his “Congregationalist” Colonel?  Does any man really suppose, that, of a score of noble young fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country, the Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss, and the Homoousians translated from the battle-field to the abodes of everlasting woe?  War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not be.  He must not be a bigot and a fool in the presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls to battle, and where a man should have but two thoughts:  to do his duty, and trust his Maker.  Let our brave dead come back from the fields where they have