"EVIL is good in the making," says the optimist philosopher.
Even the more sober view of life reveals

That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

Out of the calamities and horrors of war came to the
nation a larger life. Communities had been lifted out of
pettiness, churches had half forgotten their sectarianism,
to millions of souls a sublimer meaning in life had been dis-
closed. Lowell said it in two lines:

Earth's biggest country's got her soul,
And risen up earth's greatest nation.

The South had suffered far more than the North, and the
South reaped the larger profit. The fallacy of the old South-
ern civilization had been the idea that labor is a curse and
is to be shirked on to somebody else. Overthrow and im-
poverishment brought labor as a necessity to every one,
and slowly it was revealed as a blessing.

When General Lee, stately in figure and bearing and
splendid in dress, met in surrender the sturdy Grant, in
worn and homely service uniform, it was emblematic of
the yielding of the aristocratic order to the industrial democ-
racy. There was significance in the victor's kindly words,--
"Let your soldiers keep their horses; they will need them
when they get home for the spring plowing." That was

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