And when his greater grandson, creator, guide, and guardian of modern civilization, paced with restless, ever-present steps, around the borders of that small world of light which he had built up, half blindly, in the overwhelming dark, and with two-handed blows beat back, with the iron mace of Germany, the savage assaults of Saracen and Sclave, of black Dane and brutal Wendt, and smote on till he died smiting, for order, and law, and faith, and so saved Europe, and, let us humbly hope, his own rude but true soul _alive_! are not the thanks of all the world well due, that Karl der Grosse was no non-resistant, but a great, broad-shouldered, royal soldier, who wore the imperial purple by right of a moat imperial sword? There are wars like these, that, as the world goes, are inevitable. Some wrong undertakes to rule. Some lie challenges sovereignty. Some mere brutality or heathenism faces order, civilization, and law. There is no choice in the matter _then_. The wrong, the lie, the brutality, the barbarism _must go down_. If they listen to reason, well. If they can be only preached or lectured into dying peaceably, and getting quietly buried, it is an excellent consummation. If they do not, if they try conclusions, as they are far more apt to do, if they come on with brute force, there is no alternative. They must be met by force. They must get the only persuasion that can influence them--hard knocks, and plenty of them, well delivered, straight at the heart. Wars so undertaken, under a divine necessity, and with a divine sadness, too, by a patient people, whose business is not brutal fighting, but peaceful working, wars of this sort, in the world's long history, are scarce evils at all, and, even in the day of their wrath, bring compensative blessings. They may be fierce and terrible, they may bring wretchedness and ruin, they may 'demoralize' armies and people, they may be dreadful evils, and leave long trails of desolation, but they are none the less wars for victories in which men will return thanks while the world shall stand. The men who fall in such wars, receive the benedictions of their kind. The people that, with patient pain, stands and fights in them, bleeding drop by drop, and conquering or dying, inch by inch, but never yielding, because it feels the deathless value of _the cause_, the brave, calm people, who so fight is crowned forever on the earth.