By the 17th of June, Massachusetts had an army; but when the Concord farmers made their appeal to arms, two months earlier, it was the spontaneous uprising of an armed people to maintain their own votes and defend their threatened homes. This it is, and not their military achievement, striking as that was, which gives their town a place in martial history. The unregenerate imagination of mankind still delights, after so many centuries of barbarous warfare, in the recital of deeds of battle and the conquering march of great soldiers; Alexander and Cæsar--even Hannibal and Bonaparte--continue to receive admiration for their victories; but the purer fame of Washington rests on the accomplishment of that for which the men of Middlesex rushed to arms on the 19th of April, 1775. As Emerson, our Washington in the field of literature, said, “If ever men in arms had a spotless cause, they had.” “Behold our river bank, Whither the angry farmers came In sloven dress and broken rank,-- Nor thought of fame: Their deed of blood All mankind praise; Even the serene Reason says ‘It was well done.’” War had been the normal state of Europe; and from the hour when Bulkeley and Willard made here their honest bargain with the red landlords of these game preserves, cornfields, and fishing-places, down to the Franco-German campaigns of 1870,--235 years,--there had been scarcely a period of twenty peaceful [Illustration: THE MINUTE-MAN. FRENCH’S FIRST STATUE.]