On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one, at half-past four of the clock in the morning, a cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of South Carolina at the wall of a fortress belonging to the United States.  Its ball carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty years, shaped and cooled in the mould of malignant deliberation.  Its wad was the charter of our national existence.  Its muzzle was pointed at the stone which bore the symbol of our national sovereignty.  As the echoes of its thunder died away, the telegraph clicked one word through every office of the land.  That word was war!

War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is claimed by its true parents.  This war has eaten its way backward through all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the infinitesimals of ordinances and statutes; through all the casuistries of divines, experts in the differential calculus of conscience and duty; until it stands revealed to all men as the natural and inevitable conflict of two incompatible forms of civilization, one or the other of which must dominate the central zone of the continent, and eventually claim the hemisphere for its development.

We have reached the region of those broad principles and large axioms which the wise Romans, the world’s lawgivers, always recognized as above all special enactments.  We have come to that solid substratum acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise:  “Necessity itself which reduces things to the mere right of Nature.”  The old rules which were enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as meaningless “as moonlight on the dial of the day.”  We have followed precedents as long as they could guide us; now we must make precedents for the ages which are to succeed us.

If we are frightened from our object by the money we have spent, the current prices of United States stocks show that we value our nationality at only a small fraction of our wealth.  If we feel that we are paying too dearly for it in the blood of our people, let us recall those grand words of Samuel Adams: 

“I should advise persisting in our struggle for liberty, though it were revealed from heaven that nine hundred and ninety-nine were to perish, and only one of a thousand were to survive and retain his liberty!”

What we want now is a strong purpose; the purpose of Luther, when he said, in repeating his Pater Noster, fiat voluntas mea,—­let my will be done; though he considerately added, quia Tua,—­because my will is Thine.  We want the virile energy of determination which made the oath of Andrew Jackson sound so like the devotion of an ardent saint that the recording angel might have entered it unquestioned among the prayers of the faithful.

War is a grim business.  Two years ago our women’s fingers were busy making “Havelocks.”  It seemed to us then as if the Havelock made half the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of inexperience and illusion.  We know now what War means, and we cannot look its dull, dead ghastliness in the face unless we feel that there is some great and noble principle behind it.  It makes little difference what we thought we were fighting for at first; we know what we are fighting for now, and what we are fighting against.