220 Brotherhood and 



community of devotion to a lofty ideal. The great 

 Civil War rendered precisely this service. It drew 

 into the field a very large proportion of the adult 

 male population, and it lasted so long that its les 

 sons were thoroughly driven home. In our other 

 wars the same lessons, or nearly the same lessons, 

 have been taught, but upon so much smaller a scale 

 that the effect is in no shape or way comparable. In 

 the Civil War, merchant and clerk, manufacturer 

 and mechanic, farmer and hired man, capitalist and 

 wage-worker, city man and country man, Easterner 

 and Westerner, went into the army together, faced 

 toil and risk and hardship side by side, died with the 

 same fortitude, and felt the same disinterested thrill 

 of triumph when the victory came. In our modern 

 life there are only a few occupations where risk has 

 to be feared, and there are many occupations where 

 no exhausting labor has to be faced; and so there 

 are plenty of us who can be benefited by a little ac 

 tual experience with the rough side of things. It was 

 a good thing, a very good thing, to have a great mass 

 of our people learn what it was to face death and 

 endure toil together, and all on an exact level. You 

 whom I am now addressing remember well, do you 

 not, the weary, foot-sore marches under the burning 

 sun, when the blankets seemed too heavy to carry, 

 and then the shivering sleep in the trenches, when 

 the mud froze after dark and the blankets seemed 



