Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/148

138 principle, the principle written by Cromwell on the statute book of Parliament: 'All just powers under God are derived from the consent of the people.' Since this war many patriotic societies have arisen, tinding their inspiration in personal descent from those who fought for American independence. The assumption, well justified by facts, is that these were a superior type of men, and that to have had such names in our personal ancestry is of itself a cause for thinking more highly of ourselves. In our little private round of peaceful duties, we feel that we might have wrought the deeds of Putnam and Allen, of Marion and Greene, of our revolutionary ancestors, whoever they may have been. But if those who survived were nobler than the mass, so also were those who fell. If we go over the record of brave men and wise women whose fathers fought at Lexington, we must think also of the men and women who shall never be, whose right to exist was cut short at this same battle. It is a costly thing to kill off men, for in men alone can national greatness consist.

XLII. But sometimes there is no other alternative. It happened once that for 'every drop of blood drawn by the lash another must be drawn by the sword.' It cost us a million of lives to get rid of slavery. And this million, North and South, was the 'best that the nation could bring.' North and South, the nation was impoverished by the loss. The gaps they left are filled to all appearance. There are relatively few of us left to-day in whose hearts the scars of forty years ago are still unhealing. But a new generation has grown up of men and women born since the war. They have taken the nation's problems into their hands, but theirs are hands not so strong or so clean as though the men that are stood shoulder to shoulder with the men that might have been. The men that died in 'the weary time' had better stuff in them than the father of the average man of to-day.

Read again Brownell's rhymed roll of honor, and we shall see its deeper meaning:

 Allen, who died for others, Bryan of gentle fame, And the brave New England brothers Who have left us Lowell's name; Bayard, who knew not fear. True as the knight of yore. And Putnam and Paul Pevere, Worthy the names they bore. Wainwright, steadfast and true, Rodgers of brave sea-blood. And Craven, with ship and orew, Sunk in the salt-sea flood. Terrill, dead where he fought, Wallace, that would not yield; Sumner, who vainly bought A grave on the foughten field,