tus: "No man ever administered well an empire won by crime."

The difficulties of its position.

In the movement undertaken by the South there was an incompatibility between the political and the military conditions. The highest statesmanship was necessary to reconcile them, yet reconciled they must be if success was to be obtained. The military condition required heavy taxation, the political opposed it; the political required Northern invasion, the military forbade it; the military required the use of the slave as a soldier, the political dared not yield him; the military required foreign aid, French armies and English fleets, the political would not give the purchase-consideration that was needful to secure them-Emancipation. State rights must be reconciled with the wrongs of Confederate conscription; the abandonment of important regions to the ravages of the enemy, with the constitutional obligation to defend them. In face of the imbecility with which public affairs were transacted-an imbecility unconcealable even from the men in the ranks-the conscript, taken by force, perhaps carried in chains, unpaid for his services, his family left in starvation at home, was to be transmuted into an enthusiastic soldier. Need it be wondered at that before the close of the war two thirds of the Confederate army had deserted? How could there be enthusiasm when there was no faith? faith in the head of the Confederacy was gone.

Iron quickly receives the excitement of magnetism, and Decline of military as quickly loses it. Steel receives it relucspirit at the South. tantly, but retains it permanently. In its military enthusiasm the South exhibited a rapid decline. They who clamored for war in the beginning were on the roll of deserters in the end. The South had the magnetism of soft iron, the North that of tempered steel. The energies of the latter, excited by the outrage on Sumter and the defeat at Bull Run, went on increasing, and were very far

from having reached their maximum at the close of the

war.

The decline of the military spirit of the South, it is often affirmed, was due to the depression that followed the fall of Vicksburg and the defeat at Gettysburg. But it needs little examination to prove that it dates much farther back. The Southern people entered into the war in the firm conviction that their antagonists would not fight. The battle of Shiloh rudely dispelled that delusion. Again and again Davis declared that the conflict, in its magnitude, had altogether outrun his expectations.

To this must be added the severity of the conscription, the tyranny of the Richmond authorities, and the discov ery made on all hands of the impossibility of maintaining the cherished dogma of state rights in presence of an arbitrary, a centralized military government. It had become very clear that secession, as it actually was, was very dif ferent from what it had promised to be. As early as the taking of New Orleans, we find fortresses surrendered because of the mutinous temper of their garrisons. In Grant's advance upon Vicksburg many of the Confederate soldiers threw away their arms and deserted. Pemberton himself was loud in his complaints of the demoralization of his army. He could not induce it to stand. The men made no concealment of the cause of their dissatisfaction, imputing their misfortunes to the misconduct of the Richmond authorities. The capture of Vicksburg fell heavily on the whole Confederacy. Contemporaneously with this, when Rosecrans advanced with the Army of the Cumberland, Bragg unceasingly fell back. From one strong point after another he retreated, until he had retreated beyond Chattanooga. No army, no matter of what material it may have been composed, can undergo such an experience without demoralization; the chief officers of that army came into open feud with their commander, and the discontent spread all through the ranks. Bragg could not control

his officers before the battle of Chickamauga, and they could not make him pursue his enemy after it. After the battle of Chattanooga he imputed their misfortunes to their misconduct, and in that condemnation Jefferson Da vis loudly joined. When Sherman commenced his campaign, it was another commencement of Confederate retreat; one strong-hold after another was abandoned, and the end of it was that Sherman reached the sea. Hood's subsequent sortie to Nashville exhibited another spectacle of mismanagement and disorganization.

To the incompetency of the Richmond authorities the misrepresentations of the Southern newspapers signally added. According to them, the whole war was a procession of Confederate victories. It could not be but that such purposed deception would occasion a reaction at last.

Profligate journalism may demoralize a people, but it can not continue deceiving them forever. In the Confederacy there was not a newspaper strong enough and courageous enough to tell the truth. Fictitious victories were blazoned forth as realities-romantic triumphs won in the face of unheard-of odds. And what was the consequence when the truth came to be known? Dissatisfaction with the government, distrust of the press, decline of the mili tary spirit.

Contrast exhibited

ministration.

If from the Confederate we turn to the National government, how fortunate was the Republic in the by the National ad- presidency of Lincoln, whose conduct secured not merely the confidence, but the unfaltering affection of the people. How fortunate in those whom he gathered round him as advisers: Stanton, his Secretary of War, an iron man, never surpassed in administrative abil ity—a man who knew how to wield, and, what is even more, how to disband armies of a million of men; Seward, who, with an ability to which his countrymen will yet render homage, guided the foreign affairs of the Republic through periods of the utmost peril. "I entered your serv

ice," he has told us, "when the hollowness of national friendship was expressed in the melancholy fact that the United States had not an assured or sympathizing friend in the world except the Republic of Switzerland;" he left it when, to no small degree through his wisdom, it had risen to be one of the great powers of the earth, and had need of the friendship of none; Welles, the creator of a navy on which the most powerful maritime nations looked with respect; Chase, who with consummate ability mastered the financial capacity and managed the financial affairs of the Republic.

At length, from the wintry heights of the White Mountains to the sun-seared sands of the Gulf, there was peace -a peace secured, not by a single battle, not by one crushing victory, but by a total exhaustion of the war-power of the South.

The result of the war.

The war has not created a great slave empire encircling the Mexican Gulf; it has not divided the continent into rival states; it has not produced the results anticipated by those who occasioned it or by those who accepted it. It has left an undivided NATION, living under a common government, clement, just, powerful -a nation in which every man is free.

To thoughtful men it furnishes another proof that the progress of nations is not the result of the devices of indi viduals, but is determined by immutable law.

CHAPTER XCVI.

THE PROSPECT.

The domain of the Republic. Its rapidly increasing population presents great differences in character, in interests, in intentions. The result of the war has shown that to these diverse people equal civil rights will be accorded.

As the Civil War occurred between two sections of the Republic which had been made separate by climate, it is plain that the chief problem for American statesmen to solve is that of the harmonizing of such discordant elements, and causing them to submit to a common rule.

Examples are given of the modes of solution of this problem by other nations-by the Romans, under their imperial and ecclesiastical forms of government; by the Chinese, and by the Turks.

It may be foreseen that, in America, the solution will depend on the development of principles already existing-universal education, and an unfettered career for talent, the result of which must be an organization of the national intellect. Some reflections are offered on the inevitable centralization of power; the conditions on which the manifestation of the physical energy of the Republic depends; the necessity of promoting the intellectual development of the now dominant race; the importance of locomotion and of a common speech; the difficulties that will arise from changes in the distribution of power; the removal of the capital of the nation to the West.

The future power and grandeur of the Republic.

THE Republic has been left by the war with a continent The domain of the for its stage of action. It has passed from United States. the condition of a coast power. It differs from older nations in this, that while they could develop only by warfare, the true condition of its growth is peace.

Its territory is divided by the meridian of 100° into two sections, the Atlantic and the Pacific. It contains regions nowhere excelled in agricultural fertility, and, for the production of some of the most important staples, nowhere equaled. It has vast mineral deposits-coal, iron, gold, silver, copper, lead, oil. It has a surface of inconceivable variety, rich savannas and sandy plains, sultry valleys and mountains covered with perpetual snow, great navi gable rivers. The student of geography can never sufficiently express his admiration of its adaptability to all the various wants of civilized man.

III.-T T