have gone for putting down first, the rebellion or the laws?  England professes not to be able to understand the principles of this wicked, this unholy war, as she calls it.  Yet she was not so slow to understand the necessity of putting down the Irish Insurrection of 1848, or the Indian Rebellion ten years later.  She thinks it impossible for the Government of the United States to subdue and hold provinces so vast as the Cotton States of America; yet she neither foreboded nor as yet has found any impracticability in renewing and retaining her hold on the vaster provinces of British India,—­provinces inhabited, all of them, by races alien in blood, religion, and manners, and many by a population greatly exceeding that of our Southern States, brave, warlike, and, to some extent, trained in European tactics.  To have abandoned India would have been to surrender the greatness of England.  English writers and speakers, in discussing our affairs, overlook wholly the fact that a rebellion may be crushed by anything except force of arms.  Among a people of the same lineage and the same language, but yesterday contented under the same Constitution, and in an age when a victory in the stock-market is of more consequence than successes in the field, political and economical necessities may be safely reckoned on as slow, but effective, allies of the old order of things.  The people of this country are too much used to sudden and seemingly unaccountable political revolutions not to be able to forfeit their consistency without any loss of self-respect; and the rapidity with which the Southern Rebellion was forced up to its present formidable proportions, mainly by party management, is not unlikely to find its parallel in suddenness of collapse.  But whether this prove to be the fact or not, nay, even if the reestablishment of the Union had been hopeless from the first, a government which should have abandoned its capital, which should have flinched from the first and plainest duty of self-preservation, which should have admitted by a cowardly surrender that force was law, that treason was constitutional, and fraud honorable, would have deserved and received the contempt of all civilized nations, of England among the first.

There is no such profound and universal alienation, still less such an antagonism in political theory, between the people of the Northern and Southern parts of the Union, as some English journals would infer from the foolish talk of a few conceited persons in South Carolina and Virginia.  There is no question between landholders on the one side and manufacturers and merchants on the other.  The bulk of the population, North and South, are holders of land, while the average size of the holdings of land under cultivation is probably greater in the Free than in the Slave States.  The largest single estate in the country is, we believe, in Illinois.  Generalizations are commonly unsafe in proportion as they are tempting; and this, together