history. However sincere may be our love of peace, war remains
irresistibly fascinating to the imagination; and the imagination of
young America has now a foreign war instead of a civil war to look back
upon. The smoke of battle, in which the South stood shoulder to shoulder
with the North, has done more than many years of peace could do to
soften in retrospect the harsh outlines of the fratricidal struggle.

At the same time, there is another side to the case which ought not to
be overlooked. The South is proud, very proud; and the older generation,
the generation which fought and agonised through the terrible years from
'61 to '65, is more than a little inclined to resent what it regards as
the condescending advances of the North. This feeling is not confined to
those out-of-the-way corners where, as the saying goes, they have not
yet heard that the war--the Civil War--is over. It is not confined to
the old families, ruined by the war, whom the tide of returning
prosperity has not reached, and never will reach. It is strong among
even the most active and progressive of the veterans of '65. They smile
a grim smile in their grizzled beards at the fuss which has been made
over this "picayune war," as they call it. They, who came crushed,
impoverished, heartbroken, out of the duel of the Titans--they, who know
what it really means to sacrifice everything, everything, to a patriotic
ideal--they, to whom their cause seems none the less sacred because they
know it irrevocably lost--how can they be expected to toss up their caps
and help the party which first vanquished, and then, for many bitter
years, oppressed them, to make political capital out of what appears, in
their eyes, a more or less creditable military picnic? It is especially
the small scale of the conflict that excites their derision. "Did you
ever hear of the battle of Dinwiddie Court-House?" one of them said to
me. I confessed that I had not. "No," he said, "nor has any one else
heard of the battle of Dinwiddie Court-House. It was one of the most