And till the

without having their philanthropy shocked. world does so understand the subject of war and retributive justice, we may be sure it is not yet ready to beat its swords into ploughshares and its spears into pruning-hooks.

2. But we must hasten to a second lesson of the times which is perhaps yet more striking and important. It will hardly be denied that our national character was becoming greatly weakened by the prevalence of a spirit of ostentatious and costly self-indulgence. Long-continued and unusual prosperity has a terrible influence to enervate and unman a people. Costliness of living will often, in such circumstances, outrun the greatest prosperity. Men make more haste to spend in expensive magnificence than to acquire. That seemingly impossible combination of Sallust, "Luxuria atque avaritia," is presented before our eyes, not only as possible but as actual. In the same communities and in the same persons, the greed of gain goes in even yoke with the greed of costly self-indulgence. Men, and perhaps still more women, learn to regard all things as necessaries of life, or at least of their delicate and favored lives, which the imagination can dream of, or which money can purchase. While one such want remains ungratified, the cravings of desire stimulate avarice to still more insatiable eagerness, till the voices of humanity, philanthropy, piety, and conscience, are all alike silenced or unheeded, amid the ceaseless clamors of these two. hostile and yet twin vices.

Of this tendency of great and long-continued prosperity,. our country is beginning to afford a very alarming illustration. We trust we are no croakers; but we can surely speak the truth without croaking. And it is a truth which challenges denial, that habits of extravagant costliness have grown upon the descendants of the self-sacrificing frugal Pilgrims with very alarming rapidity. They are to such an extent drying up fountains of our philanthropy, that we may look forward to the time as not distant, when the great centers of our wealth and population shall surpass even the capitals of the old world in accumulated masses of unfed, unclad, uninstructed and uncared for poverty. The lady who in the midst of a

the

profusion of all the costly fabrics which can be procured from the spindles and looms of the civilized world, has "nothing to wear," will be sure to meet the appeals of humanity, compassion and piety, with the plea that she has nothing to spare; and the husband and the father will have nothing to spare. While such imaginations are more busy in devising the ways of spending money than avarice itself in procuring it, men become the worse than galley slaves of Mammon, that women be no less the slaves of fashion and pleasure.

may

In this country of ours this evil is more wide-spread and alarming than it ever has been in any other. It is not only true that our prosperity has been unprecedented, both in its greatness and in its continuance, that we have enjoyed a kind of millennium of money-making, but the resulting habits of extravagant costliness spread themselves over a wider surface than in any other country. In those countries in which society is largely aristocratic in its structure, custom for the most part confines such habits of extravagance to the upper classes. The middle and lower classes are in some degree protected from their influence by the proprieties of their rank. But with us the contagion is universal, and can be checked in no class by any other consideration than those of conscience and good taste; and when these fail, it is without a limit. The wife or daughter of a plain American farmer cannot be dressed without the toilet of the Empress of the French. The democratic kitchen-maid emulates the costume of Queen Victoria and her daughters.

It is not only true that such modes of living are wasting our substance and drying up the fountains of our charity and our liberality; but they are in other respects enervating our national character. To persons and to communities long accustomed to such self-indulgent luxury the voice of conscience speaks with little power; self-denial is a thing not to be thought of. A farmer said to a friend of ours, in the very midst of the great political conflict of 1856, "I do not care who is President, I can raise as much wheat and sell it for as good a price under one as another." And that is the spirit towards which the American people were tending. It mat

tered not how our government was administered, whether the nation was honored or disgraced by the conduct of its rulers, whether justice or oppression were in the ascendency, provided only our gains and our pleasures were not interfered with. The merchant who could meet the expenses of his princely mansion, and all the costly gayeties of the season, enjoy his splendid summers at Saratoga and Newport, and, at the year's end, add a satisfactory number of thousands to his capital, thought it out of taste for him to be troubled about politics, and was more indignant at the fanaticism of those who troubled the public mind by talking of the wrongs done to four millions of slaves, than he could be at any instance of injustice which did not reach the gains of his counting-house nor the luxuries of his merchant-palace. To a people thus

enervated by enslavement to their own imaginary wants, bravery, heroism become impossible and inconceivable. In these later years as we have listened to the stirring strains of our national air, we have felt the blush of shame tingling our cheek almost equally at the words "the home of the brave," as at the words "the land of the free." Both have sounded like a burlesque. We Americans of the present generation have had very little reason to sing of our bravery.

There is great power in a season of national adversity, such as that through which we are passing, to correct these downward tendencies of our national character. Perhaps we have thought that we had nothing to spare; but we are in the way of discovering how great was the delusion. At the trumpet call of our country's danger, we are summoned to place our entire fortunes at her disposal, and our own lives, and the lives of sons, husbands, and brothers. Ah! surely we had much to spare. And the sweet voices of loved ones, of fathers and mothers that have gone, whisper in our ear to withhold nothing in this hour of our country's need. Our own love of liberty, the liberty of ourselves, and our children, and our

children's children, says, withhold nothing.

Ah! in these times we may hope to learn lessons of bravery and heroism, and become worthy to sing

-"O long may it wave

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave."

And in the midst of the sacrifices which we now make so freely for the land of our birth, and the guarantees of our. liberties, we shall think of our past self-indulgent lives, and, like the penitent Peter, we shall go out and weep bitterly; and we shall construct our future lives on a nobler and better principle. We shall train ourselves and train our children to habits of self-denial and self-sacrifice. And it may be hoped that by means of the discipline through which we are now passing, we shall become a people that will know how to enjoy prosperity without being corrupted and enervated by it-a people wise enough to possess all the unequaled resources of the good land which the Lord hath given us, and use them in furtherance of all the interests of freedom, humanity and universal civilization. Such a people we must become, selfdenying, brave, heroic in the midst of prosperity, or we can never attain to the destiny which divine Providence seems to have marked out for us. The history of the human race in all its degradations and crimes presents nothing so revolting and shocking, as the conception of this nation with all the high and glorious lessons of its past, enjoying the exhaustless resources of North America, and yet using them in corrupting, enervating self-indulgence, and in the unbounded costliness of fashionable ostentation. If we are to become great as our hopes, we must find a corrective of these vicious tendencies. It is devoutly to be hoped we may at least partially find it in the stern discipline of the present hour.

3. A third vicious tendency in American character, which we mentioned, is a lack of admiration and reverence for a strong, energetic, and benignant government.

It is sad to observe how low the sentiment of reverence for established and rightful authority has fallen in our national mind. We have begun to conclude that the glory of an American is not that his is a free, rightful, and benignant government, but that he is not governed at all; that in this happy country every one does what is right in his own eyes. Instead of reverencing our own government for its strength,

we have been inclined to glory in its weakness. We have been sufficiently confident of its durability, sufficiently inclined, like the old Roman, to talk of the "Capitoli immobile saxum." But it has not been because we had any confidence in the strength of the government, or its power to overcome resistance should any ever be offered; but because we thought the government so benignant and so good, and the people withal so intelligent, that there was no danger that it ever would be resisted. In popular impression, in general estimation, we had no government. And when our present chief magistrate was forced to make his way to the national capital unattended and unknown, under the cover of the friendly darkness of the night, we were mortified indeed, but it did not arouse the nation, nor even the party which had elected him. It was not much worse than we expected, and we soon made up our minds to submit to the national indignity, and "go around Baltimore !!"

And this want of reverence for the authority of a strong government was producing disastrous effects on our whole national character. We were evidently in need of some vigorous discipline. The element of reverence for rightful authority was slipping out of the national mind. Our young men were beginning to feel that all authority is despotism, all government tyranny, and all submission and obedience servility. Just in proportion as such views prevail among any people, they become incapable of virtue, or of anything that is truly great and noble in character. That man or that woman into whose character the spirit of cheerful and reverential obedience to rightful authority does not enter as a predominating element, cannot be either virtuous, or great, or noble, or lovely. Such a character is monstrous; a nation of such characters is a nation of monsters, and would be loathed of men and abhorred of God. And those traits of American character which have exposed us to the severest criticism from enlightened foreigners, have all sprung from this very vice. Any discipline, therefore, which tends to correct this vice, is evidently one which young America does greatly need.