Quite as notable a change has taken place in personal reputation. Many of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall. Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly--impotent for good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have displayed. In cabinet and camp, in army and navy, in the editorial chair and in the halls of eloquence, the men from whom least was expected have done most, and those upon whom the greatest expectations had been founded have only given another proof of the fallacy of all human calculations. All has been change, all has been transition, in the estimation men have held of themselves and the light in which they presented themselves to each other.
Opinions of duties and recognitions of necessities have known a change not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we know to be the truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability. The storm has been raging around us, and doing its work not the less destructively because we failed to perceive that we were passing through anything more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood upon the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of old rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until the very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live, has fallen and been destroyed; and yet we know not whether the nation dies, or grows to a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete but reliable old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth a new so unexpected and so little prepared for that it may be salvation or destruction as the hand of God shall rule. The past of the nation lies with the sunken Cumberland in the waters of Hampton Roads; its future floats about in a new-fangled Monitor, that may combat and defeat the navies of the world or go to the bottom with one inglorious plunge.[5] And this general transition brings us back to the negro, whose apotheosis is after all only a part of the inevitable, and may be only the flash before his final and welcome disappearance.