BRIEF ESSAYS 217 



pened in the ancient wars that the army was de- 

 feated that had the sun in its eyes. Often some 

 false rumor, some accidental cry, turns the tide. 

 The morale of an army is everything: faith in 

 their general and in the jtistness of their cause, — 

 there are no reinforcements like these. Indeed, 

 every impulse that is manly and nohle and elevating 

 tells tremendously in war. 



These are perhaps some of the considerations that 

 lead us to judge war between nations by a different 

 standard from the one we apply to individual en- 

 counters. It has not the demoralizing element of 

 base anger. There must be something that vastly 

 more than offsets the brutal element in it, else the 

 good could never have flowed from it that we know 

 has flowed. Men who settle their differences by 

 blows and blood are always the worse for it. But 

 nations are often the better for it. It sets new and 

 larger currents going. The nation is above the in- 

 dividual, and the national life is often cemented 

 and strengthened by the blood of the best citizens. 



SOLITUDE 



Emerson says, "Now and then a man exquisitely 

 made can live alone, and must; but coop up most 

 men and you undo them." Solitude tries a man in 

 a way society does not; it throws him upon his 

 own resources, and if these resources be meagre, if 

 the ground he occupies in and of himself be poor 

 and narrow, he wiU have a sorry time of it. Hence 



