"Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob of adventurers and shopkeepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it well enough when he said that he could never think of America without seeing a gigantic counter stretched all along the seaboard.'' It is the Civil War that James Russell Lowell referred to in this passage; it is the Civil War that revealed once more, as the War of Independence had also revealed, the idealism of those remote forbears of ours who...