| American press, when it finds a leading English journal deliberately and recklessly pouring vinegar and vitriol into the wounds of the national pride and sensibility? How can we expect our kinsmen of the North to believe in our friendship and good wishes, when our newspapers go out laden with columns of scornful comment upon a disaster that might prove fatal to a people less high-spirited and resolute? What can they think of our anti-slavery sentiment, or even of our international neutrality, when they see the slaveholding rebellion treated with far greater respect than the Government elected by millions of freedom-loving freemen, and the atrocious rhapsodies of the New York Herald quoted as the utterance of a settled transat American. What peans to the honor of the Jupiter in the Capitol at Washington should we have heard resounding from the Olympus in the Blackfriars, if the battle of Bull Run had filled Manassas Gap with the corpses of the Confederates! Then would the swelling strain have rolled across the Atlantic in notes ontpealing the loudest New York thunder. Then would history and imagination have been stretched for parallels to the greatness of the conflict and the glory of the victors. Then would the Confederate cause have been denounced as abhorrent to gods and men-treason of the utmost turpitude, rebellion of parricidal wickedness. Then should we have been told that Beauregard had chosen his own ground, the strongest between the Potomac and Rich-lantic policy? If there were no sin or shame mond, had strengthened it with all military strength, concealed within a cincture of wood and hill, ninety thousand men, and had been driven from his intrenchment by twenty or thirty thousand undisciplined volunteers, fired with the ardor of conscious rectitude, and made invincible by the heroism of disinterested valor. The battle has gone the other way,-and, behold, the laurels that have been woven for President Lincoln are proffered to President Davis. Yet, not quite so. "We" who were in the "route" had the momentary candor to admit that it was a drawn battle, not a disgraceful defeat. The fugitives may rally. The numbers may be balanced. The event may be reversed. It is not safe to crown Beauregard till McClellan has been vanquished. Meanwhile, till the eagle settles on this banner or on that, let us revile the combatants. Let us say the National army was "a screaming crowd," and the Confederates only less frightened than the "mob" that fled when no man pursned. Let us say, in the face of plainest facts, that the forces were equal, and the encounter an open and stand-up fight. Let us require of soldiers from the counting-house and farm, the steady courage of veterans. Let us suppress all reference to frequency of panic in battle; make the "riffraff" of the regiments represent "the grand army;" transfer, from a few lawless ruffians who escaped the ProvostMarshal, to the entire expedition, the shame of burning houses on the outward march, and fleeing back pale-faced over the smoking embers. Let us do all this with an affectation of surprise and regret, and hold off till we see whether the Confederates capture Harper's Ferry. It is thus the Times seems to have taken counsel with itself, after the perusal of its Special Correspondent's graphic narrative of the panic that followed on a well-sustained fight. The fight he did not see. The panic naturally shocked and enraged an historian who has seen as much of wars as Xenophon. The Special Correspondent will, doubtless, be able to make good his story against the reclamations of men who saw less and felt differently. But what can we expect from the VOL. II.-Doc. 13 in exaggerating and ridiculing an event fraught The disaster which has befallen the army of the United States is undoubtedly a great one, though we cannot say that it was wholly unexpected, and still less that it is irretrievable. Vast bodies of men new to arms, unversed in the ordinary evolutions of warfare, and almost as much so in regimental discipline, are brought face to face with one of the most difficult tasks that soldiers can be called upon to perform, and they prove unequal to it. In this there is nothing wonderful. If they had succeeded, it would have been immensely to their creditnot merely for raw heroism, but for disciplined valor-precisely that quality which they have had the least opportunity of acquiring. The intrinsic magnitude of the misfortune is a repulse before a position which was deliberately selected for its strategical advantages, and which has since been diligently fortified with all the aids that practised ingenuity could suggest. Such a defeat could be borne without dishonor, and without material effect on the issue of a campaign. If it had been received by disciplined troops, they would probably have retired to a safe distance for the night, and renewed the attempt the next day, with a victory as the gross result. The apparent magnitude of the calamity, that which makes it look overwhelming, is due to the unnecessary and disorderly flight. The best troops in the world are liable to panics, but the liability is infinitely greater with raw levies, abounding in patriotic zeal and native courage, but necessarily wanting in cohesion and self-reliance. It is remarkably easy now to point out several blunders which are fairly responsible for the defeat; but, instead of assuming for ourselves the credit of the discovery, we will assign it to a quarter where it had at least the honor of being prior to the event. The New York Times, in an article published the day before the battle, distinctly pointed out the circumstances which might justify the prediction of an untoward result. In truth, it was a foolhardy step to hurl untried troops against a position of unknown strength, and which turned out to be an amphitheatre of masked batteries, supported by an overwhelming force of the enemy. In such a game, all the advantages are on the side of the defence. To the assailants, nothing was likelier than a defeat, and with an army so heterogeneous in its composition, imperfectly disciplined, and officered by yesterday's civilians, a defeat was certain to end in something worse-a universal break-up and pell-mell rout. In the delirious excitement which followed, the disaster was no doubt greatly exaggerated. It was gradually found out that all the men were not slaughtered, that all the artillery was not taken, and that regiments which presented a miserably broken appearance on the morning after the battle, soon filled up their ranks as the runaways came in. The affair was a fight and a scamper, the scamper being unquestionably the worst part of it. The consequence of the disaster will be lamentable, no doubt, chiefly by protracting the war, and exciting intenser passions on both sides; but to describe it as an Austerlitz," is a blunder only possible to those who sacrifice accuracy to a taste for grandiloquence. 66 his duty, that unpropitious junction would have been avoided. It is the old tale of Grouchy and Blucher at Waterloo. Every Frenchman knows that if Grouchy had not been culpably negligent, Blucher would never have been able to come to the assistance of Wellington, who in that case would have been beaten hollow. The theory is very natural, since it interposes an "if" as a shield against the dishonor of defeat, but there is something to be said against it. In the first place, Gen. Johnston was known to have joined the main army of the rebels long before the fight on the 21st, so that the advantage thus acquired by the enemy was foreseen. It is the same as if Blucher, instead of arriving at Waterloo at 4 o'clock on the afternoon of the 18th June, 1815, had joined Wellington the day before, and Napoleon had known that he had two enemies to contend against instead of one-a circumstance which would have made all the difference. In the next place, before blaming Gen. Patterson, we ought to ask whether he was in a position to do all that was required of him. The same journal which censures him so loudly, tells us of his success on the 15th, and adds that his men were so mutinous for want of shoes and other necessaries, that he had to appeal to them in the most pathetic terms to stand by him, and not forsake the flag of the Union, but without success. If this is true, it is arrant injustice to blame him. We trust our Northern friends will not copy the Carthaginians, by crucifying a general just because he is unsuccessful. That will be a sorry way of mending their misfortune. The advance on Manassas Gap was doubtless imprudent, and has turned out most unfortunate; but the people were in favor of it-they demanded it, they howled for it. They had their way, and they have been taught a lesson. Their sole business is to improve it. If they are wise, magnanimous, and brave men, they will not make this misfortune more ignoble by wrangling over it, but try to find in defeat the discipline and patience which lead to victory. REPLY TO -Manchester Examiner. THE LONDON TIMES ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY. A new and singular charge is brought against "unlimited Democracy." We are told that it does not furnish the "slightest security against After such a disaster, recrimination naturally the worst of wars," the proof being the civil rules the hour. The great question is, Whom war in the United States. We must observe at shall we hang? Of course a victim will be the outset, that the writer's superlatives are found, even if justice itself expires in the effort sadly at fault. War, it is true, has broken out to make its own award. The gentleman who between the North and the South, but, for any is likeliest to figure as culprit-in-chief is Gen. thing that is urged to the contrary, this catastroPatterson, who commanded the troops at Har-phe may have happened in spite of the sagest preper's Ferry, and whose special business it was to give an account of Gen. Johnston, the rebel commander, who was at the head of 25,000 men. The favorite theory is, that the junction of Gen. Johnston's troops with those of Gen. Beauregard, on the 21st, decided, the fortune of the day, and that if Gen. Patterson had done cautions and the strongest securities that human wisdom could suggest. It may be that under any other form of government known to the world, the Americans would have been fighting twenty years ago, end that civil strife has been delayed so long simply because of the palliative and remedial tendencies of Democratic in by a bayonet thrust into a living heart; but then the irrefragable answer to sentimental maundering of this sort has been that there are things more precious to mankind than life. Honor, principle, conscience, liberty, the balance of power, the integrity of an empire, or the glory of an "idea," have been put singly into the scale, and declared to be immeasurably heavier than limbs, life, or wealth. One great objection to the extension of political liberty at home has been that it might beget an indifference to national honor, and interfere with that steady prosecution of a foreign policy which is supposed to be safest in aristocratic hands. Commerce has been assailed for the same stitutions. It may be that the boiler has burst, site assertion. War in a just cause has been notwithstanding the best preventive appliances described to us as a glorious thing. We have of science, the steam-plug, the safety-valve, and been told that there are times when a nation the water-gauge, in which case the true de-by refusing to take up arms, shows that it has scription of the accident would be, not that these lost its manhood, and is fit henceforth to be appliances do not furnish the "slightest secur- snubbed as sneaks and cowards. It is a dreadity," but that in political, as in other machinery, ful thing, truly, for men deliberately to aim a the strongest precautions cannot always pre-rifle at each other's skulls, and send daylight vent an accident. Then, as to the "worst of wars," it may safely be maintained that the civil war in America is not the worst that has been recorded in history. So far, there has been astonishingly little bloodshed, and it seems likely to prove "civil" in more senses than one. The alienation which has long existed between the North and South may teach us to be sparing of our rhetoric about fratricide. The Americans are brothers much as all people that on earth do dwell are brothers, but there has been far more real fellowship of feeling between Frenchmen and Englishmen during the last forty years than between the citizens of South Carolina and Massachusetts. As for the causes of the present strife, they are infinitely more re-reasons. A nation of merchants and shopspectable than the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, keepers it was feared would prefer the secuwhich took us to the Crimea, and cost the lives rity of trade, and the opportunity of quietly of tens of thousands of Englishmen. Finally, getting rich, to the obligation of assisting a disit is not true that democracy in America is tressed ally, maintaining the sacred principle "unlimited," as the writer will find by turning of international justice, or even washing with to M. de Tocqueville. One great object of the bloodshed a suspicious taint from the national framers of the American Constitution was to escutcheon. The people who have been dinlimit the power of the people. Both in the ning our ears with such arguments for the last mode of its election and its appointment of its ten years ought to hail the American war as representative power, the Senate is essentially an apology for civilization, as one of the most an aristocratic and conservative body, while auspicious signs of the times. Here we have the clause in the Constitution which ordered politically the freest nation on the globe, as that three-fifths of the slave population in the well as the most commercial, flinging their South should be added to the white population, wealth and their lives away in order to fight as a basis for calculating the number of repre- for a principle. At trumpet call the merchant sentatives to be returned to Congress, runs full closes his glutted warehouse and sends his in the teeth of that doctrine of civil and politi- young men off to the battle-field; the capitalist cal equality which is the essence of democracy. unstrings his purse, and pours out its contents Moreover, it is clearly demonstrable that the to supply arms and provisions for the troops; civil war has sprung out of those elements of the the manufactories are closed, for there is no American Constitution which are not Demo-work, and the artisan exults in idleness and cratic; and, indeed, so far as analysis can establish any sort of probability, it is inconceivable how, if democracy in America had been "unlimited," the war could have arisen. If the foes of free government are really anxious to array the experience of the new world against the theories of the old, if the expediency and the justice of a six-pound franchise in England are to be determined by the merits of the contest now waging between President Lincoln and President Jefferson Davis, we shall be glad, especially at this season of the year, to enter into the controversy. But by all means let us know what we are arguing about. Let us import into the discussion so much discrimination at least as would suffice to distinguish a root of horse raddish from a watermelon. We are slightly surprised to find it set down among the special disadvantages of Democracy that it offers no security against war. We should rather have been prepared for an oppo poverty because they are sanctified in his eyes by adherence to a holy cause. On the theories that have hitherto found favor with our critics, this sight is one of the most glorious_and inspiriting that the world ever beheld. It proves beyond contradiction that commerce does not rust the national energies, and that the freest people are the most prompt to fight for any object they consider just. Only imagine what would have been said if the North had submitted peaceably to a partition of the Republic. That course might have been wise, beneficent, and best in harmony with their institutions; but on that point we need say nothing; but how the world would have rung with bitter taunts on their pusillanimity! We should then have been told that Democratic institutions were an utter failure; that they had proved themselves unable to nurse and mature a great national sentiment; that their tendency was to endless disintegration, and to the rendering all however, be admitted that whatever special security our own constitution supplies, it has obtained the means of giving that security by departing from the ideal of pure monarchy and approximating to that form of self-government which has been established in the United States. We have far more in common with Washington than with Vienna; and in calumniating the free institutions of any country, we merely disparage and denounce the indisputable source of our own greatness. Government impossible. See, it would have | Be it so. We are not republicans. Let it, been said, the meanness, the cowardice, the insensibility to a great name and lofty destinies which Democracy produces. These people were yesterday one of the greatest nations on the globe, and at the first check they abdicated their greatness rather than draw the sword. Democracy begets and nourishes poltroons. We must look elsewhere for those manly virtues by which States contend successfully with perils that threaten their existence, and, at length, emerge from their trials stronger, purer, and more glorious than ever. -Manchester Examiner. THE IMPRESSMENT OF BRITISHI SUBJECTS IN NEW ORLEANS. There are no people so thoroughly on their good behavior before all the world as the two unfortunate parties in the fratricidal contest now raging in America. They have to prove not only their sense of justice and their regard for truth, and also that they are not needlessly sensitivo or too ready to fall into a quarrel. There is a general persuasion in this part of the world-indeed, all over the world, except between Niagara and the Gulf of Mexico, that the present state of affairs there is the natural result of a defiant, offensive, and intolerable tone of talking and acting on all matters whatever. The American is rather too apt to consider himself absolutely right, and is pleased to think he is so occasionally to the confusion of others. A high civilization holds it in the greatest of social misfortunes that there should be a difference at all. An American does not regard this as so great a misfortune, compared with having to own himself a little mistaken, or misinformed as to a trifle. With such peo Alas for Democracy! its enemies will give it no quarter. In their desperate hurry to mangle its limbs, to cut its throat, to demonstrato that it has forfeited all right to live, they do not even care to be just. Whether it fights or abstains from fighting, it is all the same; whether it obeys the fiery impulses which have made Europe for eighteen centuries ono continuous battle-field, or meekly drops its arms in mute submission to fortune, its reputation is fore-doomed. What else could we have expected when its enemies assume to sit as judges, and the critic who professes impartially to try its conduct never lays aside his vulgar, unphilosophic, unsparing, and indiscriminating hate? If, however, we must try democratic institutions by this new test, we challenge its application with pleasure. Only let it be applied fairly. There are a great many nations under heaven, some of which have lasted long enough to furnish ample materials for comparison. Our own country is one of the most highly favored. Society here is strong, having its roots far back in an immemorial past, long before the date of Bunker's Hill or even the discoveries of Colum-ple, when a quarrel has once arisen, there can bus. Yet we have had our civil wars. Not to go back to the time of the Plantaganets, when the claims of rival dynasties swept the land with fire and slaughter for a century together, we have had one great rebellion which sent a monarch to the block, another rebellion which drove another monarch from his throne, and two more rebellions, the last of which saw an army of Highlanders in the heart of the kingdom. Within the memory of men still living we had a great rebellion in Ireland, where bat-ed themselves. tles were fought and scaffolds well furnished Mr. Russell has been for some time in the with victims. Even within the last thirty United States discharging for the British pubyears the Duke of Wellington regarded that lic, not to say for the whole world, the same country as one that required to be held with a services that he did so well before in the Crimea large garrison, and ruled over by a mitigated and in India. He has everywhere had to perform of martial law. Do the recurring disasters form his laborious duties under difficulties inof half a dozen centuries prove that monarchy conceivable to most of his readers, and little conveys not the slightest security against the shared by writers compiling narratives at a worst of wars"? We will not send our read-library table, or taking down the words of some ers abroad, to Paris, to Vienna, or to Warsaw, customary informant. He has had to write in where civil war exists in its worst form, the haste, in exhaustion, in noise, in danger, in the helpless struggle of a brave people against om- very turmoil of war, with disputation and even nipotent battalions. If the civil war in Amer-menace still in his ears. He has been occasionica proves any thing to the disparagement of democracy, what do the convulsions of Europe prove for monarchical institutions? But ours, it may be said, is neither the one nor the other. I be only one appeal-that appeal to arms, which has now assumed such terrible proportions, and the issue of which no man can venture to foretell. But if there is any hope of a compromise-if, even in our own time, we are ever to see the Northerner and the Southerner discussing their differences amicably in Congress, it can only be by the introduction of a less positive, less domineering, less provoking tone than that on which the Americans have hitherto prid ally contradicted, generally confessed to be right, and sometimes has frankly and courageously avowed himself to be mistaken or misinformed. His letters are now before the world in the form of volumns, and, having passed | subsequent information leads him to withdraw through the ordeal of criticism, are part of the or qualify a word, the conclusion is that he literature of his country. Nowhere has his lib- sacrifices every thing to truth. In the deporterty of speech been so furiously arraigned, and ment of the Governor of Louisiana the concluhis vocation so denounced, as in the United sion is that he may be safely put out of the States. A correspondence in another column question altogether. will show how little support, truthful, exact, and candid as he is, he is likely to receive there, even from those who might be supposed above the madness of a mob. This is a matter that should be known, for it helps to illustrate the state of things in the United States; and the government of Louisiana has not mended matters, or served its cause, by attempting to discredit the informant who has told the simple truth. -London Times, August 13. WAR EXPENSES AND WAR TAXES IN AMERICA. Every Englishman knows, by the experience of his own country, where the shoe would begin to pinch the American belligerents. In that country, as elsewhere, any number of men can be procured to fight, after some fashion, in any cause, good or bad, if they are only well paid, well fed, well clothed, well housed, and moderately well commanded, with some prospect, if not of booty, at least of a whole skin. So it becomes a question of money. A confidence in money alone has always proved false; but money there must be, and there is no country in which it is more necessary than in the United States, where wages are high and work is abundant. He had stated that at New Orleans British subjects had been forcibly impressed into the ranks of so-called volunteers. On their resistance he said that they had been knocked down and dragged off, and only released after energetic representations by the British Consul to the authorities. When we find it admitted by Colonel Manning, aide-de-camp to the Governor of the State of Louisiana, that there do exist at New Orleans volunteer corps called the Carroll Guards, which he admits to be without any recognized military organization, to be so far beyond the control of the authorities, and for whom, therefore, he wisely declines to be responsible, our readers will easily understand how British subjects, in common with other people at New Orleans, would be liable to great outrage, notwithstanding earnest wishes to the contrary on the part of the authorities. Those authorities wish two things not easily compatible. A war will cost there almost as As politicians they wish to enjoy the benefit of much as it did here, for if the work is nearer a strong popular feeling and a large force of vol- home, and the area of the war somewhat less unteers. As the conservators of public order, than the whole surface of this terraqueous they wish no man to be forced, and British sub-globe, still, for that very reason, there is much jects, at all events, to be left alone. Mr. Russell interruption of the ordinary pursuits of life. frankly admits that they acted on the latter feel- In the first place, all the bonds of debtor and ing as soon as the opportunity occurred, and that creditor, whether public or private, and all the he erred in charging them with a degree of eva- relations of business in cotton and other cultision before they released the British subjects vation, are at an end. The State Governments who had appealed to the Consular aid. They themselves set the example of repudiation by had been released, it appears, with as little de- refusing to cash bonds, or coupons, which can lay as was necessary to receive the statement be traced to the possession of the other party of their case. Thus far the story is very intel- in the struggle. Searching interrogatories are ligible. The Carroll Guards go about the work-put, and must be answered on oath, before a shops and wharves of New Orleans compelling this man or that to join their ranks. They meet with occasional resistance and excuse, particularly that of being subjects of the British crown. They don't care much for this, perhaps because they don't believe it, perhaps because they have heard the American theory that every person who lands in America with the intention of residing there acquires the rights and the duties of an American citizen. The Consul is asked to appeal in their favor, and the Governor, on hearing their statement and that of their captors, lets them go, but not till they have suffered some detention and outrage. When this is undisputed, when it must be admitted that it was matter for record, and when the Governor of Louisiana cannot think himself ill-used, we do not see why he should seize on the admission that no evasion had been practised to invite general disbelief in Mr. Russell's statements. In every good society in this country, when a man frankly confesses that State will pay interest which may find its way 66 |