and have been taught our weakness by suffering. The enemy is only encouraged by our mistakes, is disheartened by his recent reverses, and has lost quite as heavily as we, while his power of recuperation grows less every day as the stringency of the blockade increases, and his own land becomes more exhausted. Only one thing now can give him hope, foreign intervention, our constant bugbear, his perpetual will-o'-thewisp. But if we look this full in the face, its dangers vanish. We have little to fear from it provided we are true to ourselves. No doubt, if our blunders went on, intervention might come, perhaps to save us from annihilation; but give us victory, and we are safe. England and France can, if they choose, decide that the South has earned its independence, and can recognize the Confederate States of America as a nation. But what then? From a civil war it becomes a foreign one, and all the rebels have gained is a word of encouragement, something to be sure, but not much, so long as we are the strongest. If the blockade is effectual, we have the same right to enforce it as before; if we are able to subjugate the South, the conquerors of India and Algeria have earned no right to protest.

Our future military movements, it is probable, will be a continuation of those in the spring. The strategic points of the South, the State capitals, the forts and railroad centres, will be seized and held, and its armies scattered. Charleston, Montgomery, and Chattanooga will be in our hands, as New Orleans, Nashville, and Corinth are now, and with all such points in our possession the armies of the Confederacy must melt away as Beauregard's did last spring. Guerilla and brigandage will be the only resource, as for a while after the evacuation of Corinth they were throughout the West; and these can do little against a firm and vigorous rule.

But the military problem, severe as it is, is nothing compared to the political one which will present itself when the war, as a war, is over. It is hard to realize how completely the points at issue have been changed within a year. Our situation now is perhaps no more difficult, certainly no more perilous, than then, but different. If our arms had been successful a year ago, if Bull Run had been a victory, and had been followed up by an immediate occupation of all the

Southern States, and a hundred thousand well-trained soldiers (not a Bull Run "town-meeting") could have done it then, there would have been such an outburst of thanksgiving from the oppressed Unionists of the South, such exultation at being rid of the tyranny, such a welcome to the old flag, that the love for the restored Union would have been such as the old had never known. But this was not to be, and it is well it was not. It was better that the old slaveryridden Union should never be restored, that the day of cringing and compromise should be wiped out even from memory, if it could be. The flag, which had for so many years been dipped in African blood, must be baptized in our own before it could become the symbol of a truly great and free nation. And this has been done, the heart aches to think how faithfully, what noble lives have sacrificed themselves to the cause, not in vain if the nation they died for shall come out of the struggle purified and ennobled. The blood of these martyrs will be the seed of our new civilization.*

The old Union was forever lost at Bull Run. It is a nobler and better one we have been laying the foundations of since. Already it has appeared to many as if the only choice lay between separation and subjugation. Judge Nelson of Tennessee, who more than a year ago surrendered his allegiance on the ground that the United States government had not, with the best of wills, shown itself able to protect loyal citizens in the seceded States, was only one out of thousands who, firm Unionists at the start, have been driven by circumstances

* Mr. Hamilton of Texas, who knows the rebellion well, used the following words in a recent speech in New York: "Restore the government, its Constitution, and its laws to all, fellow-citizens. With all my heart. Restore the Union as it existed for the year just preceding the rebellion? God forbid. Am I to be remitted back to the soil of Texas, to be hunted by assassins the little remnant of my life? Am I to go there to teach my little son that the chief blessing of his great future is to run from street to street, and from man to man, and insist that he is as sound a man upon this subject of slavery as lives? Am I to see my neighbors and friends hung by the neck because they have doubted that the chief business of the Great Ruler of the Universe is not in directing and controlling and maturing and perpetuating the institution of slavery? No, fellow-citizens; if I cannot go there and strike hands with my friends at home, if I cannot be again united with my family, except upon the terms that I am to live in such society as existed there, hard as it is to utter, I can find it in my heart to say, let me never see them. But if you mean by the restoration of the Union as it was, a restoration of that Union such as our fathers intended it to be, then, with all my heart, let us have it."

into equally hearty rebellion. No doubt even now there lurk here and there a few concealed loyalists. Now and then an incident like the recent escape to us of the distinguished representative from Texas, Mr. Hamilton, shows that we have perhaps underrated the strength of the Union sentiment in these localities. But few dare avow themselves as such, even in the presence of our arms; for there is yet a chance, they argue, that the Confederacy may triumph, and they do not care to subject themselves to the fate of Jacksonville. So the Union feeling has apparently disappeared, even where once it was very strong, except in Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and probably Western Texas, where the stern and uncompromising loyalty of the inhabitants deserves a better fate than it has met. Still, even if we acknowledge that the Union as it was is destroyed, and a new one can only be built up after subjugation, we must bear in mind that whatever may be the result, separation or enforced Union, the fighting cannot stop yet. If the Southern Confederacy were to be established, we must yet fight for boundaries; if we are to have peace at all, we must fight for an honorable peace. No treaty could be made which could last a day, unless one which we granted after a triumphant victory.

We will leave out of view the alternative of separation; it has been often enough discussed, and its impracticability demonstrated. Nothing but the direst necessity will ever bring the people of the United States to consent to dismemberment of their territory. So much is fixed. But on the other alternative, what right have we to conquer an unwilling people? Our legal right in the premises is undeniable. Except where the doctrine of secession as a constitutional right has obtained a foothold, no person has been bold enough to defend the rebellion but on the sacred principle of revolution, and an edifying sight it is to see the London Times and the Quarterly Review taking up the cudgels in behalf of the right of a people to self-government. But the right of forcible revolution contains in itself the counter right of putting down the revolution by force, -the right of every state to maintain its integrity and defend its existence, corresponding to that of every man to protect his own person from assault. Had the conspirators chosen peaceful legal proceedings in order to

carry into effect what they called the constitutional right to secede, it would have been another thing. But they chose violence, because they knew very well that in no other way could they succeed in dragging the peaceful majority into the gulf of secession. And, as the movement they attempted was not peaceable secession, but armed revolution, our legal right to crush it is unquestionable, and no civilized power on earth would dare to interfere between an outraged government and its insurgent subjects. The moral right is no less clear. We believe in the right of a people to determine its own form of government and choose its own rulers; and had secession in its beginning presented itself on the ground of such a deliberate choice, we believe the people of the North would have respected it, and eventually consented to separation. But it lacked every feature of lawful, orderly procedure. Neither have its successes given it a right to recognition. An organization like this, resting on the greatest crime of history as a "corner-stone," instituted without provocation, and from first to last marked by the basest perfidy and atrocity, can never earn a right to succeed. And if such a misfortune is in store for the world as its success, it should never be while we, the natural guardians of liberty on this continent, have a man or a dollar to devote.

Assuming, then, our military success, the work which will lie before us when the rebellious States have been vanquished and reduced to civil order will be one that it is our duty to examine carefully and understand well beforehand. It is a tremendous problem, but one that we cannot shrink from, and to the solution of which our national energies must be as earnestly directed, and our resources of money, if not of blood as lavishly poured out, as upon the immediate military problem. It may be thought that a question which depends upon so many contingencies had best be left for its own day to settle. We did not think the rebels over wise when they boasted that their most serious perplexity would be in determining which of the Northern States they would admit into their Confederacy. But we need to prepare for the future, and the humblest efforts in this direction may not be wholly without value.

In this examination, everything depends upon two prelim

inary points; whether, when the revolted States are once reduced to subjection, we shall have the power to keep them so; and whether, this being granted, we shall be able to bring about ultimately a state of things so advantageous to the Southern people that a feeling of acquiescence, and at last of satisfaction, will be developed. The first is proved by the firm and orderly rule of our military governors in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Louisiana. New Orleans and Memphis have probably never been so quiet and well administered as now. It must not be forgotten here, that we do not impose a new and foreign yoke, but re-establish the national power where it was overthrown by treason and violence, where at least a large minority opposed its overthrow, and where the great mass of neutrals or "trimmers "— those whose shifting weight turns every close election will be as ready to transfer their allegiance back to the government de jure, as they were to give in their adhesion to a government de facto. We think, therefore, a temporary acquiescence, and even a moderate Union feeling, may be looked for. But this is not enough. A government sustained by military power, like that of Austria in Venice, and of the United States in New Orleans at the present time, will never do in the long run. It is utterly at variance with our national habits and feelings, and with the spirit of our institutions.

Let us consider the situation at the termination of hos tilities. An immense, thinly settled country, its population for the most part half-civilized and vindictively hostile, its strategic points in the military occupation of our troops, the fields laid waste and houses burned, bands of guerillas prowling about the country, and every now and then surprising and massacring a garrison. Society, at best rude and barbarous in these regions, will then be reduced to a state of anarchy, -anarchy in the country, in the cities despotism. How to meet all these evils? The desolation of the land, so much deplored in guilty Virginia and dreaded by loyal Pennsylvania, is the least of them, its terrors are much exaggerated. With peace, immigration, and systematic industry, two years would see these naked, ravaged fields smiling with abundant harvests. And as for the brigands and guerillas, we may perhaps have reason to bless the stern hand of war, which will retain