It is a commonly received opinion, though perhaps more largely entertained by authors than by their readers, that the ever-increasing luxury of the present day has done much to weaken the warlike virtues. This opinion, I believe, is exactly the opposite of the truth, and is merely the echo of the opinion of those writers of ancient Rome who made and bequeathed to us a thoroughly mistaken diagnosis of the diseases and symptoms of the body politic of their own decaying empire. Our own late wars, but above everything of the kind in modern or ancient times, the late great American war, show how entirely false is this opinion. Never was a war before carried on upon so great a scale, in proportion to the population of the communities engaged in it; never was a war more deadly; and never before was a war so thoroughly voluntary in the cases of so large a majority of the common rank and file of the combatants. The history of the 7th New York Volunteers, a regiment of gentlemen who went out, at the beginning of the war, of their own free will, and went through the whole of it with all its hardships, sufferings, and deadliness, would alone disprove this opinion. The hundreds of thousands of men who in the North left their countinghouses, their farms, and their drawing-rooms, to risk health, and limb, and life for an idea, are just so many hundreds of thousands of arguments against it. And in some respects the argument from the South is still stronger, for there a still larger proportion of the people went to greater hardships, more cruel wants and sufferings, and to a deadlier warfare, inasmuch as the same regiments had more frequently to meet the enemy. In every family I visited in the South I heard tales of suffering and of heroism. I will only repeat one, because it shows what a lady even can do and bear in these luxurious times. A Mrs. Read, while assisting her husband at the siege of Vicksburg, had her right arm so shattered by a shell that immediate amputation was necessary. It was during the night, but she would not have anyone called off from other work to do for her what she was still capable of doing for herself; she therefore held with her left hand the lamp which lighted the surgeon to amputate her shattered right arm. [Sidenote: _Eden._]