534

THE REPUBLIC INSOLVENT.

to adjourn till the bill was passed, which has resulted in giving the Treasury a million of dollars a day!

The Americans are doing their best to amuse and instruct the world. We have no need of amphitheatres of gladiators, of wild beasts, of burning Christians, and all the other amusements of the jaded old Roman; for we cannot unfold a paper without the description of some desperate conflict between all the varied means of human destruction. We ought to be obliged to people who undertake at such a sacrifice to relieve the tedium of civilized existence.-Times, Jan. 81, 1863.

I

VII.

F this style of speaking of the American people is not likely to "bind the two countries together in ties of perpetual amity," as the Times sang so cheerfully while the Prince of Wales was here, it will not be our fault.

Again:

The Americans have taken a plunge into the infinite. They are breasting the waves of the Atlantic in the very maddest attempt that ever wearied madman. They have infinite territory, infinite people, infinite water power, infinite corn and cotton, infinite destiny, infinite brag; the other day they broached an infinite reservoir of oil, they have now tapped infinite credit. They feel as the youth does with a constitution, a fortune, a character-everything whole and untouched. He can never get to the end of them; at least it is a very long time yet. Bystanders know better. We, too, know better how it is faring with the Americanswith the Federals even more than the Confederates, inasmuch as the former trust most to money, the latter to men.

The wisdom of the Saturday Review (Feb. 8, 1865) still shines forth :

Perhaps the most striking circumstances in recent accounts from America, is the great coolness with which the people of the North contemplate the insolvency of their Government. They know that the old boast about patriotic loans of indefinite extent has collapsed before enough had been raised in this shape to meet a single quarter's expenditure. They know, too, probably better than we do, that the often-repeated assurance that taxes shall be imposed sufficient at least to cover the interest on the debt will never be realized. Like its promises to pay, the promises to tax of the Federal Government will be redeemed on paper. An abstract resolution in favor of raising by taxation a revenue of not less than £80,000,000 has been almost unanimously voted by Congress, but among the financial arrangements which are said to bave met with favor, there is included a condition that direct taxation shall be postponed as long as possible. That it is unconstitutional, if not illegal, is the smallest of the objections to it. The real difficulty is that an income tax would not be paid, and unless half of the 600,000 men of the Federal army are to be employed, like the Austrian soldiers, in collecting taxes, all the votes that can be passed may fail to extract the longed-for dollars from Western farmers, or even from the traders of the Atlantic seaboard.

THE NORTH UTTERLY RUINED.

535

BUT

VIII.

in the following from the Times, our military position and destiny are more elaborately defined and summed up (Sept., 1861):

Were England at this moment to announce to the world its intention to make the speediest possible conquest of France, or were France to make the same declaration as to England, the world would laugh at the egregious folly that had inspired the design and prompted the boast. The world would grant that, supposing either people to be infatuated enough, and obstinate enough, it could inflict enormous and irreparable injuries on the other, but only at the cost of equal injuries to itself. Now, that is the case of the two Confederacies across the Atlantic, where the surviving half of an effete Federal Union has undertaken to reduce the other half to its Federal duties. We say that this is the case; but before we proceed a step farther, it is necessary to observe that the case of the Northern Americans is in some important respects more difficult than ours would be. They have to protect more than a thousand miles of land frontier, including one closely beleagured position surrounded by foes or illaffected adherents. Speaking the same language as their foe, they have no means of excluding spies from their lines, or even traitors from their ranks. They have to make a standing army and a fleet. They have to learn the first elements of tactics, and even military discipline. They are without soldiers, or officers to command and to train them.

Lastly, war, which changes its character according to circumstances, establishes special rules of probability for different localities. The one rule established by all American warfare is that the advantage is on the side of the defence. Our offensive operations always failed against fortified positions, against breastworks thrown up in a night, against forests full of an invisible foe; against heat, hunger and thirst; against the ever imminent flank attack; against the certainty that every step diminished the number, the strength, and the munitions of our own men, and increased those of the enemy. The present war might, for its incidents, be a chapter in our own disastrous wars on that soil.

There is only one enterprise which can be compared to this, and that is the first Napoleon's gigantic, but infatuated attempt on Russia. If any one will attempt to compare the means of the Federalists with those of Napoleon, he will find them far inferior in every respect; while there is no doubt that the Southern States are far more able to defend every point, every position, every line in their territory, than the Russians were in theirs. They have mountainous ranges instead of steppes; they have a population accustomed to carry arms, and only too glad to use them; they have railways, and abundance of food and other necessaries of war. They are evidently superior in generalship, and in the social organization best adapted for war. We are in a condition to offer advice. We can advise the Northern States of America, as we can advise the legitimate Princes and the despotic Courts of Europe. Let the statesmen at Washington only do what England has done before a hundred times, and what all Europe has done, is doing, and will still do. Let the Northern States "accept the situation," as we did eighty years ago upon their own soil; as Austria did two years ago at Villafranca and Zurich. Let them count the cost before they march forth to drive half a million armed men a thousand miles across their own country into the Gulf of Mexico. Let them consider whether they can do what Napoleon could not do in the plenitude of his power, with many times their number, their stores, their credit, and above all, their military skill and experience, his school of Generals, and his supply of veterans. What they propose to do and be is not only to be as good as the Southerners, or a little the better, but overwhelmingly superior. Are they? Is not this an overweening opinion of themselves? Can they drive the Southerners like a flock of sheep, smoke them out of their own nests like wasps, ferret them like rabbits, and bag them like game? Of course not.

536

RICHMOND CANNOT BE TAKEN.

IX.

read the files of the Times, the Saturday Evening Review, and the Richmond Enquirer of these days, one would innocently suppose they were all edited by the same hand. They all held the same language-You never can take Richmond. The Times said so after Davis' cowardly flight from his capital.

The London Morning Herald (May 13, 1864) writes:

We know almost enough of the campaign in Virginia to declare Grant's advance upon Richmond a failure, and to express a confident hope that the last fiery trial of the Southern Confederacy has been safely passed.

From other parts of the Southern States the news is scarcely less cheering to the Confederates. The advance upon Atlanta is a failure. Johnston's position is said to be too strong for attack. We shall probably learn in a few days that here also the attack has been made and repulsed. From the Red River the news continues most disastrous to the Federal arms, and gold in New York is at 75 premium. How will the New York mob submit to the draft? And where are the soldiers to enforce it?

Our Lieutenant-General fares no better at the hands of "The leading journal of Europe,” than anybody else:

To the war in Virginia the Federals devoted their best army, their main stores of material, and their most determined commander. The force which advanced southwards at the beginning of May was the strongest force ever equipped by the North, and it was in excellent bands. If Grant was not an accomplished general, he was an intrepid and resolute soldier, proof against discouragement, and bent upon winning at all hazards and by any means. Nevertheless, up to this hour he has been completely foiled by the superior skill of his antagonist; and the resources at his command are now to all appearance so nearly exhausted, that it is hard to see what success greater than a safe retreat remains within his reach. He has kept his promise of "fighting it out all the summer," but without the result which he anticipated. Through three long months he has marched and countermarched, manœuvred and fought, until no new device or strategy seems left to be tried, but the end is that Richmond is safe while Washington is menaced, and that Lee is master of the field. It is true that the campaign is not yet over, and that war is full of uncertainties; but the strongest partisans of the Federal cause can hardly expect that the Virginian expedition will be anything but a failure. This result, too, would carry with it a most comprehensive moral. If Grant and his army could do nothing, it is scarcely conceivable that any other Northern army could do better, and the conclusion must be plain that the great object of the Federals-the capture of Richmond-is absolutely unattainable.-Times, Aug. 22, 1864.

X.

DOOR Sherman's "retreat to the Atlantic " the Times thus handles, Dec. 20, 1864:

SHERMAN'S RETREAT TO CAROLINA.

537

His march is a repetition on a larger scale of the "great strategic movement" by which McClellan transferred his army, after his defeat before Richmond, to Harrison's Landing, where it found "safety," and the Federal gunboats and transports. But the distance between the York and James rivers is not, as in Georgia, measured by hundreds of miles. McClellan executed his manœuvre successfully, but the campaign itself was a failure. Sherman has undertaken a more desperate operation of the same kind. He must march to the sea, as no Federal flotilla can ascend the Savannah to aid him. His difficulty is one of frequent recurrence in military history, ancient and modern. An invading army must keep open a line of retreat in case of being out-manœuvred or overpowered, or run the risk of destruction or surrender, either fatal to the expedition. The "ten thousand " Greeks were led by Xenophon from the plains of the Euphrates to the shore of the Black Sea, but the enterprise was undertaken by the wreck of an army. The retreat itself is celebrated in history, but it told the world that the invasion of Persia was a ruinous failure. It is possible that Sherman may save as much of his army as he can march to the shore of the Atlantic; but not the less will the invasion of Georgia have been signally defeated.

In the same issue the Times says:

To the Northern public the sudden movement was represented as a great military operation, intended to continue the campaign by a bold plunge into the enemy's country, to attack Augusta, and destroy the powder works of the Confederate Government. The capture of the city of Savannah was equally part of the plan. Co-operation in an assault of Charleston from the land side was even suggested as possible. The real purpose of Sherman was much more simple, yet difficult enough to carry out successfully, as he has discovered. It was to extricate his army from an untenable position by a rapid march to the seacoast and the aid of the Federal fleet. In the first part of his expedition he was so far fortunate that as he advanced he found no enemy before him. But the Southern troops now begin to appear, and it is by actual, and not successful, encounters with them that his position is made clear. . . . . . In addition to the difficulties presented by the natural features of the country, the temper of the population must also be considered. South Carolina, always dissatisfied and restless under the old Federal Constitution, was the leading State of the present disruption. It was the first to declare the Southern Confederacy, and the first to commence the actual war by the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The successful defence of that fort and the city of Charleston itself against the repeated attacks of the Federal fleet, has encouraged the spirit of the people, and no Southern State is more confident of the issue of the struggle. Taking the country and the population together, it is impossible to predict for General Sherman a progress through it so easy as he has found his march to its frontier.

Even the Northern press cannot persist in representing Sherman's desperate march as a deliberate and skillfully-calculated military operation. We believe it was not a calculation, but a necessity. Sherman had no choice, except of difficulties, long before he quitted Atlanta.

And so things went on till Grant had entered Richmond, and the Confederacy collapsed, while the delighted British reader was being freshly assured every morning that there was no prospect of "Grant ever being able to save his army." The leading journals and statesmen of England thus found themselves in the mortifying dilemma of having been sottishly ignorant of the facts, or of having, during four years, willfully persisted in torturing or hiding the truth, and thus deceiving their readers.

538

ENGLISH DEMOPHOBIA.

XI.

HE bitterness of the English press grows chiefly out of English hatred of Democracy. That hatred is an English idiosyncracy. It characterizes Englishmen above the men of all other nations. With them Democracy is an object of hatred and disgust. Nothing in the form of Democracy ever existed on British soil. The plant never germinated there; it never could as an exotic take root there; it never could live there. Such a thing as an English Democrat is a contradiction in terms. It is an absurdity; it is an impossibility. If asked to name the strongest political passion of the English people of all ranks, I should say demophobia-hatred of the people. The English pen has at all periods been dipped in this gall when taken up to treat any American subject; while during our rebellion it has inspired the whole policy of the Government in its dealings with us, and the whole course of British journalism when we were the theme.

A fair illustration is found in the following slur upon the Government while treating the Trent affair:

If we had to deal with any other than a democracy we should have no doubt upon the matter. It would be impossible for any monarch to deny a reparation which all the civilized world has declared to be just, for he would feel his personal honor tarnished by such a war. To a democracy the same appeal cannot be made.

No wonder that Mr. Lincoln, luxuriating in the paradise to which the will of an unbridled democracy has introduced him, and looking forward to a desperate struggle with England, brought about apparently by the same cause, should feel a pious horror of those who venture to think such experience not conclusive, and the existing Constitution of the United States a little short of perfection! We have nothing to say for Slavery, but if Mr. Lincoln's description of the South is indeed true, if she is fighting to emancipate herself from the blind tyranny of a degraded mob, from elective judges and elective governors, he has given his antagonists a better title to European sympathy than they have hitherto possessed, and thrown upon his Government the stigma of fighting to impose upon others institutions which have already brought it to the verge of ruin.-Times, Dec. 17, 1861.

The London Morning Herald, par excellence, the organ of the Aristocracy, thus speaks (Feb. 4, 1862):

Whatever may have been the original merits of the quarrel;-. . . . . It is scarcely possible to doubt that both the world at large and the inhabitants of the Southern States in particular, are likely to be great gainers by the permanent disruption of the Union. The Americans had become a nuisance among nations. The enormous growth of their population, the pro