A Forgotten Maxim 273 



whose short-sightedness and supine indifference pre- 

 vented any reorganization of the personnel of the 

 Navy during the middle of the century, so that we 

 entered upon the Civil War with captains seventy 

 years old. They are close kin to the men who, when 

 the Southern States seceded, wished to let the Union 

 be disrupted in peace rather than restored through 

 the grim agony of armed conflict. 



I do not believe that any considerable number of 

 our citizens are stamped with this timid lack of 

 patriotism. There are some doctrinaires whose eyes 

 are so firmly fixed on the golden vision of universal 

 peace that they can not see the grim facts of real 

 life until they stumble over them, to their own 

 hurt, and, what is much worse, to the possible un- 

 doing of their fellows. There are some educated 

 men in whom education merely serves to soften the 

 fibre and to eliminate the higher, sterner qualities 

 which tell for national greatness; and these men 

 prate about love for mankind, or for another coun- 

 try, as being in some hidden way a substitute- for love 

 of their own country. What is of more weight, there 

 are not a few men of means who have made the 

 till their fatherland, and who are always ready to 

 balance a temporary interruption of money-making, 

 or a temporary financial and commercial disaster, 

 against the self-sacrifice necessary in upholding the 

 honor of the nation and the glory of the flag. 



But after all these people, though often noisy, 

 form but a small minority of the whole. They would 

 be swept like chaff before the gust of popular fury 



