We are now going through not merely the severest, but the only danger which has ever seriously clouded our horizon.  The perils which harass other nations are mostly traditional for us.  Apart from slavery, democratic government is long since un fait accompli, a fixed fact, and the Anglo-American race can no more revert in the direction of monarchy than of the Saurian epoch.  Our geographical position frees us from foreign disturbance, and there is no really formidable internal trouble, slavery alone excepted.  Let us come out of this conflict victorious in the field, escaping also the more serious danger of conquering ourselves by compromise, and the case of free government is settled past cavil.  History may put up her spy-glass, like Wellington at Waterloo, saying, “The field is won.  Let the whole line advance.”

There has been a foolish suspicion that the North was strong in diplomacy and weak in war.  The contrary is the case.  We are proving ourselves formidable enough in war to cover our shortcomings in diplomacy.  How narrowly we escaped demoralizing ourselves, at the last moment before Congress adjourned, by some concession which would have destroyed our consistency without strengthening our position!  If we could even now bind our generals to imitate our Cabinet in its admirable and novel policy of silence,—­to eschew pen and ink as carefully as if they were in training for the Presidency!  The country is safe so long as they shut their mouths and open their batteries.

The ordeal by battle is a stern test of the solid power of a nation.  There must always be some great quality to produce great military superiority,—­skill, or daring, or endurance, or numbers, or wealth, or all together.  Except the first two, neither of these special qualifications has been even claimed by the Secessionists; and these two have been taken for granted with such superfluous boastfulness as to yield strong internal evidence against the claim.  Certainly their general strategy, up to this moment, has yielded not a single evidence of far-sighted judgment or conscious power, while it has shown decided glimpses of weakness and indecision.  Indeed, how can an army like theirs be strong?  Its members mostly unaccustomed to steady exertion or precise organization; without mechanic skill or invention; without cash or credit; fettered in their movements by the limited rolling stock of their scanty railways; tethered to their own homes by the fear of insurrection;—­what element of solid strength have they, to set against these things?  In the present state of the world, strong in peace is strong in war.  In modern times an army of heroes is useless without facilities for arming, transporting, and feeding it, to say nothing of the more ignoble circumstance of pay.  Considerations of simple political economy render it almost impossible for a slaveholding army to be strong collectively, nor do the habits of Southern life usually fit its members to be strong singly.