Counter-Currents
(through the medium of the newspapers) that he lived in a brotherhood of nations,—"forty-eight nations in one Union,"—he forgot that these forty-eight nations, or at least thirty-eight of them, were not always a brotherhood. Nor was the family tie preserved by moral suasion. What we of the North did was to beat our brothers over the head until they consented to be brotherly. And some three hundred thousand of them died of grievous wounds and fevers rather than love us as they should.
This was termed preserving the Union. The abiding gain is visible to all men, and it is not our habit to question the methods employed for its preservation. No one called or calls the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" a cry to a tribal God, although it very plainly tells the Lord that his place is with the Federal, and not with the Confederate lines. And when the unhappy Belgians crowded the Cathedral of St. Gudule, asking Heav-
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