It is therefore of the utmost benefit to have men thrown together under circumstances which force them to realize their community of interest, especially where the community of interest arises from community of devotion to a lofty ideal. The great Civil War rendered precisely this service. It drew into the field a very large proportion of the adult male population, and it lasted so long that its lessons were thoroughly driven home. In our other wars the same lessons, or nearly the same lessons, have been taught, but upon so much smaller a scale that the effect is in no shape or way comparable. In the Civil War, merchant and clerk, manufacturer and mechanic, farmer and hired man, capitalist and wage-worker, city man and country man, Easterner and Westerner, went into the army together, faced toil and risk and hardship side by side, died with the same fortitude, and felt the same disinterested thrill of triumph when the victory came. In our modern life there are only a few occupations where risk has to be feared, and there are many occupations where no exhausting labor has to be faced; and so there are plenty of us who can be benefited by a little actual experience with the rough side of things. It was a good thing, a very good thing, to have a great mass of our people learn what it was to face death and endure toil together, and all on an exact level. You whom I am now addressing remember well, do you not, the weary, foot-sore marches under the burning sun, when the blankets seemed too heavy to carry, and then the shivering sleep in the trenches, when the mud froze after dark and the blankets seemed altogether too light instead of too heavy? You remember the scanty fare, and you remember, above all, how you got to estimate each of your fellows by what there was in him and not by anything adventitious in his surroundings. It was of vital importance to you that the men of your left and your right should do their duty; that they should come forward when the order was to advance; that they should keep the lines with ceaseless vigilance and fortitude if on the defensive. You neither knew nor cared what had been their occupations, or whether they were in worldly ways well off or the reverse. What you desired to know about them was to be sure that they would “stay put” when the crisis came. Was not this so? You know it was.