The Spirit Proper to the Times

The necessity for making sacrifices would seem to be founded in this: as we cannot have every thing, we must be willing to sacrifice some things in order to obtain or secure others. Wicked men recognize and act upon this principle. Can you not recall more than one person in your own circle of acquaintances who is sacrificing his health, his good name, his domestic comfort, to vicious indulgences? Worldly people recognize and act upon this principle. Look at that miser: he is hoarding up his thousands and his tens of thousands, but in order to do so, is he not sacrificing every thing which makes life worth having? It is a mistake to suppose that religion, or morality, or the public necessities, ever call upon us to make greater sacrifices than those which men are continually making to sin and the world, to fashion and fame, to "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life."

In times of ease, and abundance, and tranquillity, the public takes care of itself. There are few sacrifices on the part of individuals for the public good, because there are few occasions for such sacrifices. They are not made because not called for, because not needed. Moreover, private benevolence is apt at such times to become less active, and, for the same reason, that is to say, because less of it is required.

This state of things is seized upon by those who are eager to put the worst possible construction on human nature and human conduct, as evidence of extreme degeneracy. How often are we to be told that our present troubles are sent upon us in order to lift the whole community out of the mire of money-getting propensities, where every thing like public spirit was in danger of being swallowed up and lost? I protest against this wholesale abuse of what has been,--at best, a gross exaggeration. The whole truth in this matter is told in a few words. By constitution, by habit, by circumstances, our people are intensely active; and this activity, for want of other objects, has been turned into the channels of material prosperity. If, therefore, you merely affirm their excessive eagerness in acquisition, I grant it; but if, not content with this, you go on to charge them with being niggards in expending what they have acquired, I deny it, emphatically, utterly. Read the history of what has been done in this commonwealth, in this city, during the last twenty-five years for humanity, for education, for science and the arts, for every form of public use or human need, and then say, if you can, that public spirit has been dying out. Our people have never been otherwise than public spirited, and hence the promptness and unanimity of their response to this new call to public duty. Hence also our confidence in it,--not as an excitement merely, which a day has made, and a day may unmake, but as an expression of character.

Let us, however, be just to the excitement itself, considered as the sudden and spontaneous uprising of a whole community to sustain the government. We need demonstrations of this kind, from time to time, to reassure us that all men have souls. It is worth a great deal merely as an experiment, on a large scale, to prove that the moral and social instincts are as much a part of human nature as the selfish instincts. But he must be a superficial observer who can see nothing in this vast movement but the play of instincts. It is a great moral force.

Not a little of what passes for loyalty or patriotism in other countries is blind impulse, growing out of mere attachment to the soil, or the power of custom, or a helpless feeling of dependence on things as they are. "If my father in his grave could hear of this war," said a Spanish peasant, "his bones would not rest." Yet what earthly interest, what intelligible concern had Spanish peasants in the rivalships and struggles of princes who thought of nothing but their own or their family aggrandizement. Of such loyalty, of such patriotism, there never has been much in this country, and there never will be. The loyal and patriotic States have risen up as one man to maintain the government, because the government represents the great ideas of order and liberty. It is not an excitement of irritation merely, or of wounded vanity, or of a selfish and discomfited ambition. It is, as I have said, a great moral force, a reverence for order and liberty; an excitement, if you will have it so, but an excitement resting on solid and intelligible principle, and one, therefore, which trial and sacrifice will be likely to convert into earnest and solemn purpose.