NECESSARY BELIEFS. 61 



tally compromised by any thing he did in support of 

 the Union during our civil conflict. It was the 

 dream of many cultivated men in Boston and Cam- 

 bridge twenty-five years ago, that we had come to 

 an era in which wars were to be unpopular with cul- 

 ture throughout the world. It is the dream of many 

 men of culture yet, that such an era is ahead of us. 

 Our great commissions for the discussion of inter- 

 national law, and for the arrangement of common 

 rules in commerce, are full of hope to-day, although 

 'most of their members are lawyers and dry men of 

 the world, that self-interest will ultimately prevent 

 war between people of the English-speaking class. 

 Is it altogether too early for us to look upon our 

 Peace Societies as timely organizations? Are they 

 not a promise to which at this season we may well 

 listen as to a bugle calling us from afar, and hav- 

 ing in it more hope than was in the bugles heard at 

 Lucknow ? " England and America," wrote Carlyle 

 to Dickens in 1845, " are properly not two nations, 

 but one ; inseparable by any human power or diplo- 

 macy; being already united by Heaven's Act of 

 Parliament and nature and practical intercourse ; 

 indivisible brother elements of the same great SAX- 

 ONDOM, to which in all honorable ways be long life." 

 When Charles Sumner's oration for peace was made, 

 not a few circles of culture were inclined to think 

 that Tennyson sang something authoritative when 

 he said, 



" I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, 



Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be, 



