The immense activity of thought and ingenuity elicited by the war, and extending to all the departments of enterprise appropriate to the great crisis, is a phenomenon peculiar to the American people. It could be exhibited nowhere else, to the same extent, among civilized nations, because nowhere else is the same stimulus applied with equal directness to the popular masses. The operation of this peculiar cause is conspicuously plain. The Government of the United States is the people's Government; the war is emphatically the people's war. Every man feels that he has a personal interest in it. He understands, more or less clearly, the whole question involved, and has fixed opinions, and perhaps strong feelings, in regard to it. His friends and neighbors and brothers are in the army, and they have gone thither voluntarily, perhaps impelled by enlightened and conscientious convictions of duty. His sympathies follow them; he ardently prays for their success; and he is stimulated to provide, as well as he can, for their comfort. All other business being greatly interrupted, if not wholly suspended, he thinks continuously of the mighty operations of the war. He dwells on them night and day, and in the laboratory of his active mind, excited by the mighty stimulus of personal and patriotic feeling natural to the occasion, he produces those extraordinary combinations which distinguish the present era. In addition to these impulses which operate so generally, there is the still more universal and all-pervading love of gain which stimulates his inventive faculties, and causes them to operate in the direction in which his hopes and sympathies are turned. Aroused by motives of all kinds, the whole mind and heart of the country is absorbed in the great contest, and all its energies are applied in every conceivable way to the work of war. The man who carries the gun and uses it on the battle field is not more earnestly engaged in this work than he who racks his brain and sifts his teeming ideas for the purpose of making the instrument more destructive. Even the victims who fall in the deadly strife and give their mangled bodies to their country, are not more truly martyrs to a glorious cause than the inventors who sometimes sacrifice themselves in the course of their perilous experiments, or by the slower process of mental and physical exhaustion during the long years of 'hope deferred,' while vainly seeking to make known the value of their devices. A great power is at work, operating on the character and capacity of each individual, and affecting each according to the infinite diversity which prevails among men. A common enthusiasm, or, at least, a common excitement pervades the whole community to its profoundest depths, and arouses all its energy and all its intellect, whatever that energy and intellect may be capable of doing. It carries multitudes into the army full of patriotic ardor; it inspires others