Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/188

 toration of white supremacy and an accompanying development of inveterate hostility between whites and blacks. The sections would not have drifted apart in industrial conditions and social constitution as they did under the influence of the war; we should not have had, perhaps, a money-mad North to counterbalance a ruined, desolated, disheartened South.

And where, at Antietam, at Gettysburg, at Fredericksburg, at Chattanooga, and on many humbler fields, the flags wave over the even ranks of myriads of soldier graves, the mocking-birds would sing in thickets which the bullet's hiss and the shriek of the shell had never profaned, while their teeming populations of dead men would either be alive to-day or entombed among their loved ones after lives of peaceful usefulness.