“Well,” said I, “so you got clear out of all your trouble. Were people satisfied with the new order of things when it came?”

“People?” he said. “Well, surely all must have been glad of peace when it came; especially when they found, as they must have found, that after all, they — even the once rich — were not living very badly. As to those who had been poor, all through the war, which lasted about two years, their condition had been bettering, in spite of the struggle; and when peace came at last, in a very short time they made great strides towards a decent life. The great difficulty was that the once-poor had such a feeble conception of the real pleasure of life: so to say, they did not ask enough, did not know how to ask enough, from the new state of things. It was perhaps rather a good than an evil thing that the necessity for restoring the wealth destroyed during the war forced them into working at first almost as hard as they had been used to before the Revolution. For all historians are agreed that there never was a war in which there was so much destruction of wares, and instruments for making them as in this civil war.”

“I am rather surprised at that,” said I.

“Are you? I don’t see why,” said Hammond.

“Why,” I said, “because the party of order would surely look upon the wealth as their own property, no share of which, if they could help it, should go to their slaves, supposing they conquered. And on the other hand, it was just for the possession of that wealth that ‘the rebels’ were fighting, and I should have thought, especially when they saw that they were winning, that they would have been careful to destroy as little as possible of what was so soon to be their own.”

“It was as I have told you, however,” said he. “The party of order, when they recovered from their first cowardice of surprise — or, if you please, when they fairly saw that, whatever happened, they would be ruined, fought with great bitterness, and cared little what they did, so long as they injured the enemies who had destroyed the sweets of life for them. As to ‘the rebels,’ I have told you that the outbreak of actual war made them careless of trying to save the wretched scraps of wealth that they had. It was a common saying amongst them, Let the country be cleared of everything except valiant living men, rather than that we fall into slavery again!”

He sat silently thinking a little while, and then said:

“When the conflict was once really begun, it was seen how little of any value there was in the old world of slavery and inequality. Don’t you see what it means? In the times which you are thinking of, and of which you seem to know so much, there was no hope; nothing but the dull jog of the mill-horse under compulsion of collar and whip; but in that fighting-time that followed, all was hope: ‘the rebels’ at least felt themselves strong enough to build up the world again from its dry bones — and they did it, too!” said the old man, his eyes glittering under his beetling brows. He went on: “And their opponents at least and at last learned something about the reality of life, and its sorrows, which they — their class, I mean — had once known nothing of. In short, the two combatants, the workman and the gentleman, between them —”

“Between them,” said I, quickly, “they destroyed commercialism!”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said he; “that is it. Nor could it have been destroyed otherwise; except, perhaps, by the whole of society gradually falling into lower depths, till it should at last reach a condition as rude as barbarism, but lacking both the hope and the pleasures of barbarism. Surely the sharper, shorter remedy was the happiest.”

“Most surely,” said I.

“Yes,” said the old man, “the world was being brought to its second birth; how could that take place without a tragedy? Moreover, think of it. The spirit of the new days, of our days, was to be delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves; this, I say, was to be the new spirit of the time. All other moods save this had been exhausted: the unceasing criticism, the boundless curiosity in the ways and thoughts of man, which was the mood of the ancient Greek, to whom these things were not so much a means, as an end, was gone past recovery; nor had there been really any shadow of it in the so-called science of the nineteenth century, which, as you must know, was in the main an appendage to the commercial system; nay, not seldom an appendage to the police of that system. In spite of appearances, it was limited and cowardly, because it did not really believe in itself. It was the outcome, as it was the sole relief, of the unhappiness of the period which made life so bitter even to the rich, and which, as you may see with your bodily e............