IV


That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of
self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display--loose mobs of
local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallant
General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers--should
tear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising an
indisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should elect
to send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in the
nation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation. It
merely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred by
partyism. Such men either bore no part in the fighting when fighting was
the order of the time, or else they were too ignorant and therefore too
unpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of the intervening years and the
glory these had brought with the expanse of national progress and prowess.
In spite of their lack of representative character it was not easy to
repress impatience at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of
course it was not possible to dissuade or placate them.

All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people of
the United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so averse to
getting into that war. A very small group of extremists and doctrinaires
had in the beginning made a War of Sections possible. Enough of these
survived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep sectionalism alive.

It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it made
the presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters. There was no end of
objurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered Northerner