The honest sunshine

"Is Nature's sternest painter, yet the best";

and that gives us, even without the crimson coloring which flows over the
recent picture, some conception of what a repulsive, brutal, sickening,
hideous thing it is, this dashing together of two frantic mobs to which we
give the name of armies. The end to be attained justifies the means, we
are willing to believe; but the sight of these pictures is a commentary on
civilization such as a savage might well triumph to show its missionaries.
Yet through such martyrdom must come our redemption. War Is the surgery of
crime. Bad as it is in itself, it always implies that something worse has
gone before. Where is the American, worthy of his privileges, who does not
now recognize the fact, if never until now, that the disease of our nation
was organic, not functional, calling for the knife, and not for washes and
anodynes?

It is a relief to soar away from the contemplation of these sad scenes and
fly in the balloon which carried Messrs. King and Black in their aërial
photographic excursion. Our townsman, Dr. John Jeffries, as is well
recollected, was one of the first to tempt the perilous heights of the
atmosphere, and the first who ever performed a journey through the air of
any considerable extent. We believe this attempt of our younger townsmen
to be the earliest in which the aëronaut has sought to work the two
miracles at once, of rising against the force of gravity, and picturing
the face of the earth beneath him without brush or pencil.

One of their photographs is lying before us. Boston, as the eagle and the
wild goose see it, is a very different object from the same place as the
solid citizen looks up at its eaves and chimneys. The Old South and