Excerpt from The Constructive Problems of World Democracy Mighty perils confronted our country also at the close of the War of the Rebellion. It is hardly too much to state that the war itself was less perilous to the permanent life and well being of the United States than the period of the Reconstruction. The South can remember the surrender of Lee without any very great bitterness, but how it feels about the events that followed that surrender we are taught in such spectacles as The Birth of a Nation. It is an old and trite saying, that Peace hath its victories as well as war. No one has ever dared put into a proverb the correlative truth that peace following war hath as terrible disasters as war itself, and that these have their peculiar peril to the victor. I am indebted to Thayer's Life of John Hay for a summary of the benefits and the evils that followed our Civil War. He enumerates three benefits and twice as many evils. Without attempting to follow his language or the precise order or content of his thought we may summarize these benefits and evils, as follows. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.