principalities established or overthrown, according as the opportune moment is seized or lost. The Confederates lost their opportunity in Northwestern Virginia. It was the vice of their slave civilization that even under the tremendous stimulus of war their enterprises were all tainted with the ineffectiveness of their methods of thought and business. There was too much strutting and preening; too much thought of display for its effect on the world at large; too much orating and premature self-glorification over results not yet achieved. There was too little coldblooded calculation-too little of that far-reaching audacity which is not afraid to reach out beyond the accepted methods of ordinary men and means-to "dare, and again dare, and without end dare," in the words of the "lost Titan" of the French revolution. The daring of the Confederates only once rose above the level of a merely defensive war, though no country in the world offered a richer spoil than the North; and the experience of that exception showed them how unequal they were to anything else.

CHAPTER XXVI.

BENEFICENCE OF WAR-BARBARISM OF SLAVERY.

The conflicts that convulse nations and shake down rock-rooted institutions are often blessings in rude disguise. In heroic treatment there must be suffering. The compensation follows, but sometimes far behind. The calamity of one generation may be a godsend to the next. The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. One generation plants; the next reaps; but the thread of human sacrifice and recompense runs through all. The river is made up of drops, but it is a continuous stream. Human society likewise is a continuing body. Individuals appear and disappear, men come and go, but the stream of life, achievement and purpose flows on forever.

So whatever may be individual wrong, suffering and loss, the body of the people in their social and political structure, may as a whole be the gainer. The temporary calamities of war may pave the way to a beneficent recompense. Civil Wars are most apt to do this, for they are usually fought over some principle in whose triumph there is a vindication and establishment of justice. Age after age, England through her internecine strifes emerged from each to a higher level of intellectual and religious liberty.

Nations in peaceful times grow up to their opportunities. The opportunities themselves mostly come through violence. The portion of peoples, as of individuals, comes

to them by irregular allotment, not always recognized nor welcome at the time. The tendency of society, as of men, is to grow into grooves; and through the natural aggressiveness of all evil things, the innate inertness of harmless things and the inclination of people to non-resistance, the ruts into which the affairs of every people run if left to themselves, are oppressive to popular liberty and progress. A sort of crust grows around institutions, as the moss grows on the undisturbed stone. Social and political life becomes bound in the habit of acquiescence in wrong. When a people have become thus enmeshed through long periods of indolence, nothing but the splendid, energizing shock of war can save them from worse calamities.

In his "History of Civilization in Europe," Guizot describes how immensely Europe was broadened, educated, liberalized as the result of the Crusades, with their two centuries of waste in life and treasure, through the intellectual impulse resulting from the contact of the Western nations with the superior civilization and refinement of the Asiatics. "On the one hand," he says, "the extension of ideas and the emancipation of thought; on the other, general enlargement of the social sphere and the opening of a wider field for every sort of activity; at the same time, more complete freedom and more political unity; the independence of men and the centralization of society. They drew society out of a very narrow rut and threw it into new and infinitely broader paths." Nothing in the previous history of Europe had carried it so far on the road to intellectual development as those two hundred years of war and sacrifice, which constituted the crowning struggle

between the Christian and Mahommedan systems-a struggle which began when the Saracens crossed into Spain six or seven centuries before, established themselves in that peninsula and threatened seriously to subdue and possess all Europe. Dr. Draper says of the influence exercised by the crusades: "Coming indiscriminately from all classes of communities that were scarcely elevated above barbarism, the crusaders were suddenly brought in contact with people inhabiting countries that for ages had been the seats of civilization. Their ideas were not only enlarged but their very style of thinking was changed. Whoever escaped the perils of these religious enterprises became on his return to his native place an influential and authoritative teacher. There was a weakening of the force of those maxims that heretofore had been a guide, society relieving itself of the stress of former modes of thought. It may be doubted whether that great religious movement known as the Reformation would have been possible had it not been for the occurrence of the crusades."

The words of these writers not unfitly describe the effects wrought by the Civil War in the Southern half of this Republic. That region for more than a century had been barricaded against the enlightening and humanizing influences which had been doing their work in the Northern half as in other enlightened countries. Now the barriers which had lain for more than a hundred years across the path of liberty and progress were burned away. Until the crusades there was no Europe in the sense of intellectual or other unity. The States were petty, feudal, provincial; divided by ignorance of and consequent prejudice against each other, without community of thought or aim.

settlement and to the house of Absalom Queen. The man, although avowing himself a good Union man refused the offer, saying that he would be killed by his neighbors if discovered. He, however, gave Whaley a blanket to throw over his shivering shoulders, and directed him how to find the house of Queen. When he at last reached Queen's, he found a home-guard of twenty-five men; and here, for the first time, he got something to eat. Queen and eleven of his men accompanied Whaley; and, traveling only at night, they crossed the Tug Fork of Big Sandy into Kentucky; stopped at the house of Roland Sammon until night; and then moved down the river in a boat, reaching the forks of Big Sandy before midnight. There they found encamped the command of Col. Laban Moore, member of Congress from the Ninth Kentucky district. The party reached the mouth of Big Sandy Sunday at noon, where they were received with great rejoicing.

Whaley gave each of Queen's men an Enfield rifle, a thousand rounds of ammunition, and a lot of various necessaries, as a return for their devotion to him and to the Union cause. Absalom Queen had been a soldier in the War of 1812, and was a true-blue Unionist. There were about two hundred Union men in the settlement where he lived, and through his influence a hundred of them were in Colonel Zeigler's Fifth (Union) regiment.