Our stopping-places were thronged with soldiers, some of whom
came through the cars asking for newspapers that contained accounts of
the battle between the Merrimack and Monitor, which had been fought the
day before. A railway-train met us, conveying a regiment out of
Washington to some unknown point; and reaching the capital, we filed out
of the station between lines of soldiers, with shouldered muskets,
putting us in mind of similar spectacles at the gates of European cities.
It was not without sorrow that we saw the free circulation of the
nation's life-blood (at the very heart, moreover) clogged with such
strictures as these, which have caused chronic diseases in almost all
countries save our own. Will the time ever come again, in America, when
we may live half a score of years without once seeing the likeness of a
soldier, except it be in the festal march of a company on its summer
tour? Not in this generation, I fear, nor in the next, nor till the
Millennium; and even that blessed epoch, as the prophecies seem to
intimate, will advance to the sound of the trumpet.
One terrible idea occurs in reference to this matter. Even supposing the
war should end to-morrow, and the army melt into the mass of the
population within the year, what an incalculable preponderance will there
be of military titles and pretensions for at least half a century to
come! Every country-neighborhood will have its general or two, its three
or four colonels, half a dozen majors, and captains without end,--besides
non-commissioned officers and privates, more than the recruiting offices
ever knew of,--all with their campaign-stories, which will become the
staple of fireside talk forevermore.
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