interests, except in the cases, which must soon die out in natural course, in which force is necessary to drive out superannuated or evil-minded despots, not good enough for the age, or for the people who have lived under them. As the true Military Period gave place to another, the military mind and spirit changed, under the influence of new ideas and interests. Still the traditions of one of the chief stages of human experience were sure to live on for centuries; and when men at this day seem to be occupied with very different things, the lightest touch upon some old national association will wake up, in “a nation of shopkeepers,” ideas and emotions very like those of ancestors who lived under warrior kings. We need not go beyond our own borders to see this. England is considered the representative of the Commercial Period at which the world has arrived. We have our Peace party, and agitators who uphold it to be a virtue to repress patriotic affections in consideration of commercial tranquillity. We believed, ten years ago, that we had lost our capacity for war, partly through long disuse, and partly because a generation had grown up without military ideas, and any patriotic emotions tending in that direction. We heard our young men deprecating military training, because it wastes time, and costs money, and may be mischievous in putting quarrelsome notions into people’s minds. I, for one, heard such objections made ten years ago. Yet, what a rally to the old virtue and the old interests we have made since! Our second army in the Crimea and our present Volunteer force have proved the strength of the traditions which have come down from the military ages. It naturally follows that, when we make war, we do it under the associations and the emotions of the olden time. War is with us an ancient institution; and we have inherited the military spirit, ideas, and conscience which dwelt in our fathers, and which prevent war from being the mere savagery which it would be as a fresh characteristic of a new period of society.
The case is otherwise in the great democratic Republic of the new world; and this is the reason why the civil war in America is singularly important and interesting as a political and social study. Since I last wrote of the conflict, the battle of Bull’s Run has become a piece of almost old news in England. Yet it seems to me that we have not even tried to understand it, or to study the indications it may afford.
The Americans are really as unmilitary as we supposed ourselves to be ten years ago; and they are, for the most part, as far from being aware of the fact as we were in 1851 from suspecting what a warrior heart lay under the costume of the British trader. “The Chivalry” of the Slave States commemorate their Cavalier descent; extol slavery as procuring leisure to make the gentry a military aristocracy, carry arms, preserve a show of soldiers, arsenals, sentries, morning guns and evening drums, &c., and keep the world in order, as they think, by threatening to seize the territory, and whip the backs of all nations who displease them. The South asserts itself to be the tiptop military aristocracy of the civilised world. At the other extremity of the country, the pretension is almost as strong, though different in aspect. The sons of the Puritans have grim portraits of the Forefathers as they stood in their armour, and cherish family traditions of the way their ancestors went to work to till the ground and transact their trade. The ploughman and woodman, and herdsman went armed as regularly as Southern citizens do now. The enemy then was the Red Indian, or some foreign invader; whereas the Southern citizen’s foe at this day is his next door neighbour, or some townsman who prides himself on the number of “difficulties” he makes in the year. In the great North-west region, the population is heterogeneous; but it goes armed, to a great extent, between its apprehensions from Red Indians, runaway negroes, kidnappers, filibusters, or hostile rovers of one sort or another. Still, that population hardly considers itself military in its character, having no type in the past, and no traditional character to perpetuate. While the north-west boasts of having no ancestry, and claims the glory of being a new social creation in a new scene, the old Puritan race in New England has prided itself on having exchanged fleshly weapons for the sword of the spirit. Non-resistant doctrines have spread widely in that region; and its representatives find it a hard cross to bear when they go up to Congress to be sneered at by Southern men for carrying no weapons, and for a supposed anxiety to avoid all pretexts for duelling. Notwithstanding all this, New Englanders have the same persuasion that other tribes under the Union have, that they can flog the world simply by being the most military people, in the national aggregate, in the world. It is this persuasion, cherished under peculiar circumstances, and now brought to the test of fact, which makes the American civil war so instructive a study at present.
I believe it will be admitted in a little while by everybody, in America and outside of it, that the Americans are the most thoroughly unmilitary of the great nations of our time.
They inhabit a fresh territory, where there are no memorials of earlier periods of society. They have no neighbours who have gone through such periods in company with them, or under their observation. Their chief aims have been first, in their colonial days, a fair and comfortable subsistence; and since, an eminent material prosperity, as a sign and a result of able self-government, in conspicuous departure from the national models and political institutions of the old world. They have succeeded in their aims; but their success has destroyed that military character of thought and feeling which they have taken for granted must remain what it was when their fathers landed as soldiers, of one kind or other, from Europe. They are extreme representatives of the Commercial Period, in fact. They excel the rest of the world in the application of science to the arts of life: they are learned in the methods of creating and increasing wealth: they have the spirit of adventure which belongs to commercial enterprise, and its spirit of liberality in regard to the spread of knowledge, and of hospitality to strangers, and of munificent charity to the needy. All this and more they have; but of the military spirit they
