Friends, have patience. Remember that these men, and all like them, were slowly born of great times, and that we must await time's gestation. In this age there spring no longer heroes dragon-tooth born into full fighting-life inside of 2.30. But so surely as stars shine in their rounding life, or water runs, or God lives, so surely are these days of storm and sorrow and tremendous travail bringing slowly on their legitimate fruit of great ideas and great men. Young man--whoever you are--be sacred to yourself now, and, for a season, serious and pure and noble--for _who_ knows in these times to what he may grow? But a century ago, this land lay buried in obscurity. Here and there young land-surveyors and country store-keepers wondered that destiny had buried them on Virginia farms and in Yankee backwoods. But war came,--no greater than this of ours--one involving no grander principles of human dignity and freedom,--and the young 'obscures' darted to the heaven and took glorious places amid the constellations of fame. 'When the tale of bricks is doubled,' says the Hebrew proverb, 'Moses comes.' We hear much said of the honest, sturdy, no-nonsense virtues of the old revolutionary stock, both male and female. The thing is plain enough--they had passed through serious times and great thoughts, through trials, and sorrows, and healthy privation, and come out strong. Just such will be the stock of men and women born in spirit of this war. It is making the old material over again. It was all here as good as ever, but wanted a little stirring up, that was all. He who has seen in the sturdy East and glorious West the unflinching honesty and earnestness with which men are upholding this war to the knife and knife to the hilt, as PALAFOX phrased it,--or, as the American hath it in humbler phrase, 'from the wheel to the hub and hub to the linch-pin,'--has no doubt that at this minute it was never so popular, never so determined, never so thoroughly ingrained, entwined, inter-twisted with the whole life-core and being of our people. 'We suffer--but on with the war! Hurrah for battle--only give us victory! Do you ask for money, arms, ships?--take all and everything to superfluity--but oh, give us victory and power!' Out of such will as this there come the greatest of men--giants of a fearfully glorious future. When we look around and see this red-hot iron determination to see all through to the victorious end, we may well feel assured that the day of great ideas and of great men is not far off.