That combat is still on; the right of the subject--including woman--to a voice in the government, the right of the laborer to a fair return on his work, and the right of the smaller nation to undisturbed independence are among the uppermost problems that occupy the mind of the world to-day. Like many of his thoughtful countrymen Bryant founded his loyalty to America on the hope that in this new land the seed of new truth would fall on fertile soil. In "Earth," composed when he was in Italy, he wrote: O thou, Who sittest far beyond the Atlantic deep, Among the sources of thy glorious streams, My native Land of Groves! a newer page In the great record of the world is thine; Shall it be fairer? Fear, and friendly Hope, And Envy, watch the issue, while the lines By which thou shalt be judged, are written down. The number and bulk of his poems dedicated to America are not so great as those by Freneau or Whittier and Lowell or Timrod and Lanier, but his smaller group are as distinguished and as representative as an equal number by any of the others except, possibly, Lowell. In "O Mother of a Mighty Race" he alluded again to the envy and unfriendliness of the older nations, which disturbed him as it did Irving and Cooper. In the face of it he tried, with less success than Irving, to keep his own temper, taking comfort in the thought that the downtrodden and oppressed of Europe could find shelter here and a chance to live. As a journalist he was a strong champion of Abraham Lincoln long before the conservative East had given him unreserved support; and when the Civil War came on he sounded "Our Country's Call" and encouraged all within sound of his voice in "the grim resolve to guard it well." During the war he wrote from time to time verses that were full of devotion to the right and quite free from the note of hate that poisons most war poetry; and at the end he mourned the death of Lincoln no less fervently than he rejoiced at "The Death of Slavery."