Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/370

Rh social, civil, and political matters, whose apparent recklessness struck older nations aghast, but which we did not fear to make because we were confident of our power to recover from failure. Our relations were free, our powers were abundant enough to endure waste. Withal, we could not find opportunities to manifest all our strength. We could only promise to do and assert our ability to do, and this exposed us to malicious interpretations. In all this we see the indications of youth, of inexperience, of exuberant spirits, of overflowing power.

But the convulsion through which we passed ten years ago had the effect upon us as a nation which a grave trial has upon a man: at one step he passes from youth to manhood. He comes to know the world in which he lives. He appreciates the earnestness of life. His confidence in his own powers may be no less firm, but it is far more sober. He does not tempt the trials of life. He no longer seeks opportunities to waste his energies for the mere sake of exercising them. He husbands his powers and settles down to a less romantic, but far more efficient method of undertaking and working. So it was, I say, with this nation. War had been to us a tradition of glory. During a long peace, interrupted only by a slight foreign war, a generation had grown up which had no knowledge, from actual experience, of what war is; but to the Americans of this generation war is a lurid glory. We never can deceive ourselves as to what it means. It brings to us no poetry or romance, but we have seen the spectre face to face and have recognized its true features. We are yet so near to it that our exultation is dimmed in tears and when we turn our memory back to it, we cannot tell whether a sob or a cheer will burst from our hearts. War, to our generation of