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. Military
merit, or rather, since that is not so readily estimated, military
notoriety, will be the measure of all claims to civil distinction. One
bullet-headed general will succeed another in the Presidential chair;
and veterans will hold the offices at home and abroad, and sit in
Congress and the State legislatures, and fill all the avenues of public
life. And yet I do not speak of this deprecatingly, since, very likely,