CHAPTER XXIV
THE WASTE OF WAR AND THE WEALTH OF PEACE
LET us suppose that the history of the whole world is spread out before us like a picture, and that we are looking down on it. What will we see? Well, we will see places where a terrible storm seems to have swept over the picture, and left only darkness and ruin in its track. And we will see other places where the sun seems to have poured down its bright beams, and all is clear and bright and beautiful. The dark places are those of war; the bright places are those of peace. All through history there have been times when men have gone out to kill and burn and do all the harm they could; and there have been other times when they stayed at home to work, and build up what war had cast down, and bring plenty and happiness to the nations.
In the picture of our own history we see such dark and bright places. And the darkest of them all is the terrible Civil War, the story of which you have just read. For in this war our people fought against and killed one another, and all the harm was done at home, instead of in foreign lands. The war was a dreadful one. Hundreds of thousands of our people were killed or wounded, and the ground in hundreds of places was red with blood. Houses, barns and factories were burned, railroads were torn up, ships were sunk, growing crops were trampled into the earth. And last of all came that horrid murder of our good and great President Lincoln, one of the best and noblest men who ever sat in the presidential chair. Such is war—the most frightful thing we can think of or talk about. Some of my young friends may like to play soldier; but if they should grow up and get to be real soldiers they would find out what war means. Now, if we look again at the picture of our history, we shall see a great bright space of peace following the dark space of the Civil War. That is what I wish to tell you about now—the reign of peace, when everybody was busy at work in building up what had been torn down by the red hand of war, and our country grew faster than it had ever grown before.
There is one thing I must say here. I have told you that slavery was the cause of the war. If there had been no slaves in the country there would have been no war. And the one good thing the war did for us was to get rid of the slaves. President Lincoln declared that all the slaves should be free, and since that time there has not been a slave in the land. So we can never have a war for that cause again.
When the war was done, the soldiers marched back to their homes. Their old battle-flags, rent and torn by bullets, were put away as valued treasures; their rusty rifles, which had killed thousands of men, were given back to the government; they took up their axes, they went into the fields with their ploughs, they entered the workshops with their tools, and soon they were all at work again, as if they had never seen a field of battle.
This took place long before any of my young readers were born. But there are many old soldiers living who took part in it, and when you see the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, marching with their ragged flags and battle-scarred faces, it may bring to you some vision of what they have seen, and make you think of the fallen comrades they left behind, dead or bleeding upon the battle-field.
During your short lives there has been no war which came near to us in our homes. The angel of peace has spread her white wings over our land, and plenty and prosperity have been the rule. None of our young folks have known what it is for an army of soldiers to march past their homes, destroying and burning, and leaving ashes and ruins where there had been happy homes and fertile fields. But in the past of our country this happened to many as young as you, and they were glad that their lives were left them, after everything else was gone.