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victory meant extermination.
Such is our war. I look upon it as the commencement of the great struggle between the disguised aristocracy and the democracy of America.
You are to say to-day whether it shall last ten years or seventy, as it usually has done.
It resembles closely that struggle between aristocrat and democrat which began in France in 1789, and continues still.
While it lasts, it will have the same effect on the nation as that war between blind loyalty, represented by the Stuart family, and the free spirit of the English Constitution, which lasted from 1660 to 1760, and kept England a second-rate power almost all that century.
Such is the era on which you are entering.
I will not speak of war in itself,--I have no time; I will not say, with Napoleon, that it is the practice of barbarians; I will not say that it is good.
It is better than the past.
A thing may be better, and yet not good. This war is better than the past, but there is not an element of good in it. I mean, there is nothing in it which we might not have gotten better, fuller, and more perfectly in other ways.
And yet it is better than the craven past, infinitely better than a peace which had pride for its father and subserviency for its mother.
Neither will I speak of the cost of war, although you know that we never shall get out of this one without a debt of at least two or three thousand millions of dollars.
For if the prevalent theory prove correct, and the country comes together again on anything like the. old basis, we pay Jeff Davis's debts as well as our own. Neither will I remind you that debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine government and corrupt the people.
The great debt of England has kept her back in civil progress at least a hundred years. Neither will I remind you that, when we go out of this war, we go out with an immense disbanded army, an intense military spirit embodied in two thirds of
Lee and Shepard, 1891.
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