perish. Probably nothing ever fell more cruelly on human ears
than the taunts and execrations which American wives and mothers
heard from the other side of the ocean, heaped on the husbands
and sons whom they had sent to the battle-field, never thinking
at all of their slaying, but thinking solely of their being
slain; and very glad indeed that, if death had to come, it should
come in such a cause. If we go either to France or Germany
to-day, we shall find a precisely similar state of feeling. If
the accounts we hear be true--and we know of no reason to doubt
them--there is no more question in the German and French mind
that French and German soldiers are doing their highest duty in
fighting, than there was in the most patriotic Northern or
Southern home during our war; and we may guess, therefore, how a
German or French mother, the light of whose life had gone out at
Gravelotte or Orleans, and who hugs her sorrow as a great gift of
God, would receive an address from New York on the general
wickedness and folly of her sacrifice.

The fact is--and it is one of the most suggestive facts we know
of--that the very growth of the public conscience has helped to
make peace somewhat more difficult, war vastly more terrible.
When war was the game of kings and soldiers, the nations went
into it in a half-hearted way, and sincerely loathed it; now that
war is literally an outburst of popular feeling, the friend of
peace finds most of his logic powerless. There is little use in
reasoning with a man who is ready to die on the folly or
wickedness of dying. When a nation has worked itself up to the
point of believing that there are objects within its reach for
which life were well surrendered, it has reached a region in
which the wise saws and modern instances of the philosopher or