civilization.

For these reasons I cannot join with those who cry Peace, peace. I
cannot wish that this war should not have been engaged in by the
North, or that being engaged in, it should be terminated on any
conditions but such as would retain the whole of the Territories as
free soil. I am not blind to the possibility that it may require a
long war to lower the arrogance and tame the aggressive ambition of
the slave-owners, to the point of either returning to the Union, or
consenting to remain out of it with their present limits. But war, in
a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War
is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing
worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human
instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service
and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people.
A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a
war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is
their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free
choice--is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has
nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more
about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature,
who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the
exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice
have not terminated _their_ ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the
affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do
battle for the one against the other. I am far from saying that the
present struggle, on the part of the Northern Americans, is wholly of
this exalted character; that it has arrived at the stage of being
altogether a war for justice, a war of principle. But there was from