It is not recorded whether the proverbial English army in Flanders lied as terribly as they swore; the genius of the nation did not take that direction.  But if they did, they have now met their match in audacity of falsehood.  Captain Bobadil in the play, who submitted a plan of killing off an army of forty thousand men by the prowess of twenty, each man to do his twenty per diem in successive single combats, might have raised his proposed score of heroes among any handful of Secessionists.  There seems to be no one to stop these prodigious fellows as a party of Buford’s men were once checked by their commander, in the writer’s hearing, on their way down the Missouri River, in 1856.  “Boys,” quoth the contemptuous official, “you had better shut up.  Whenever we came in sight of the enemy, you always took a vote whether to fight or run, and you always voted to run.”  Then the astounding tales they have told respecting our people, down to the last infamous fabrication of “Booty and Beauty,” as the supposed war-cry for the placid Pennsylvanians!  Booty, forsooth!  In the words of the “Richmond Whig,” “there is more rich spoil within a square mile of New York and Philadelphia than can be found in the whole of the poverty-stricken State of Virginia”; and the imaginary war-cry suggests Wilkes’s joke about the immense plunder carried off by some freebooter from the complete pillage of seven Scotch isles:  he reembarked with three-and-sixpence.

It might not be wise to claim that the probable lease of life for our soldiers is any longer than for the Secessionists, but it certainly looks as if ours would have the credit of dying more modestly.  Indeed, the men of the Free States, as was the wont of their ancestors, have made up their minds to this fight with a slow reluctance which would have been almost provoking but for the astonishing promptness which marked their action when once begun.  It is interesting to notice how clearly the future is sometimes foreseen by foreigners, while still veiled from the persons most concerned.  Thus, twelve years before the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, the Duc de Choiseul predicted and prepared for the separation of the American colonies from England.  One month after that, the Continental Congress still clung to the belief that they should escape a division.  And so, some seven years ago, the veteran French advocate Guepin, in a most able essay suggested by the “Burns affair” in Boston, prophesied civil war in America within ten years. “Une grande lutte s’apprete donc,” he wrote; “A great contest is at hand.”

Thus things looked to foreigners, both in 1775 and in 1854, while in both cases our people were yielding only step by step to the inevitable current which swept events along.  It is the penalty of caution, that it sometimes appears, even to itself, like irresolution, or timidity.  Not a foolish charge has been brought against Northern energy in this contest, that was not urged equally in the time of the Revolution.