“War is a game, which, were the nations wise,
  Kings would not play at.”

But nations are not always wise, and war often becomes a necessity.  When, then, the necessity arises, it should be met manfully.  The question once deliberately decided that peace is no longer consistent with national honor or national safety, the dread alternative must be accepted with all its hazards and all its horrors.  To organize only in anticipation of certain and speedy success, to despise and underrate the enemy, to inquire with how small an army and how limited an expenditure the war can be carried on, is as unstatesmanlike as it is in flat defiance of all historical teaching.  But if we carry our folly still farther in the same direction,—­if we fail to take into grave account the most obvious and inevitable incidents of actual warfare,—­if in our overweening confidence we neglect discipline, underrate the prime importance of promptness and decision in action, certainty and celerity in movement, and energy and activity in pursuit,—­if, in a word, we expect that the defences of the enemy are to fall into our hands by means as unwarlike as those that decided the fate of Jericho, or dream that because our cause is just every precedent in history and every principle in human nature will be overruled in our favor,—­then we deserve to be outgeneralled, and are fortunate, if we escape final and disastrous defeat.

Now has not this been precisely our cardinal and capital error, and are we not to-day suffering its natural consequences?  To the blind and unreasoning confidence with which we began this war has succeeded a reaction running into the very opposite extreme.  We are given over to a despondency quite as unwarrantable as the extravagance of our early hopes.  We demanded and expected impossibilities.  Forgetting that the age of miracles has passed, many are now bitterly complaining that nothing has been accomplished, and predicting that all future efforts will terminate in similar failure.  Two years have not elapsed since the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter; and yet we are amazed and mortified that our forces have not overrun the whole South, that victory has not crowned our arms in every battle, and that our flag does not float triumphant over every acre of every State once called Confederate.  Whether this most desirable result could have been accomplished, if this or that policy had been adopted at the outset, is one of those problems that will never be solved; nor is the inquiry at present pertinent or profitable.  Let us rather ask whether, in view of the means actually employed, our discontent with the existing condition of affairs is not unmanly and unreasonable.  We are to measure results, not by the efforts that we ought to have put forth, nor by those which we should put forth, if, with our dear-bought experience, we were called upon once more to undertake such a gigantic enterprise.  We must recall the aspect of affairs when we first embarked on this perilous sea.  We must remember how ignorant we were of all the danger before us, how imperfect was the chart by which our course was to be determined, how many shoals and sunken rocks and crosscurrents we were to encounter, as yet unknown to any pilot on board our noble ship of state, how little we knew of navigation in such angry waters, under so stormy a sky.