No. 4.] CULTURE OF CIVIC VIRTUES. 29 



brilliant achievements of our arms as recorded in our past 

 military history." "What our general has wisely declared to 

 be essential to the making of a good soldier is equally essen- 

 tial to the making of a good citizen. He rightly appeals 

 to the culture of the civic virtues, for they are the soil out 

 of which the other virtues grow. Indeed, if you are to 

 have a good soldier you must have the materials out of 

 which to make him, and these materials are found only in 

 the good citizen. 



At the beginning of the civil wars in England the Parlia- 

 mentary generals were beaten on almost every field. They 

 could not bring their men to face the Cavaliers in battle. 

 At last a Huntingdonshire farmer came to the front and 

 asked for honest men who had a spirit in them for this busi- 

 ness. He said, and his words have the ring of democracy 

 in them : "I rather have a .russet-coated captain who knows 

 what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that you 

 call a gentleman and is nothing else." It is enough to say 

 that Col. Oliver Cromwell and his troopers never stopped, 

 when they found the enemy, to count noses, and were never 

 beaten. 



It requires great courage to be an American citizen, for 

 the first thing he has to learn is the great and, to some, the 

 very disagreeable truth which our English friends are con- 

 tinually telling us in a very wise and patronizing way : 

 "Your government is nothing but an experiment, you 

 know." Yes, we do know it is an experiment, and we know 

 something more about it that is quite important : it is the 

 greatest experiment, with, perhaps, the exception of Chris- 

 tianity, that the Eternal has tried on this globe. It is an 

 experiment to see whether, contrary to all experience in 

 the past, the social pyramid will stand more steadily on 

 its base than on its apex. It differs from any other ex- 

 periments that have been made in government in this, that 

 the base on which the pyramid stands is made up of local 

 toAvn meetings which are represented in and through every 

 layer of which it is composed to the top. In this condition 

 of things the success of the experiment depends wholly 

 upon the moral virtues, the intelligence, the loyalty and 



