But you complain of corruption among contractors, and of knavery among politicians.  Will you point me to a single war, ever waged on the face of the earth, where all the rulers were above reproach and all their subordinates unselfish?  But what will you do about it?  Grant that many contractors have made dishonest fortunes out of the calamities of their country, and that there are officeholders with whom “Stand by the Constitution!” means, Stand by the public crib from which we are richly and regularly fed, and “Uphold the Administration!” should be translated, Give us our full four years’ enjoyment of the loaves and fishes.  What then?  Shall a few worthless straws here, and a few heaps of offal there, arrest or check the onward march of a mighty army, the steady progression of a great principle?  Away with such trumpery considerations!  Punish with the utmost severity of the law every public plunderer whose crimes can be dragged into the light of day; send to the Coventry of universal contempt every lagging and lukewarm official; but, in the name of all that is holy in purpose and noble in action, move on! To hesitate is worse than folly; to delay is more than madness.  The salvation of our country trembles in the balance.  The fate of free institutions for—­who shall say how long?—­may hang upon the issue of the struggle.

Your catalogue of grievances, however, is still incomplete.  You are dissatisfied with our generalship as displayed in the field, and with the wisdom of our policy as developed by the cabinet.  Unquestionably you have a constitutional right to grumble to your heart’s content; but are you not aware that such complaints are as old as the history of the human race?  Do you believe this to be the first war that was ever mismanaged, and that our undoubted blunders are either novel or peculiar to Republics?  There never was a greater mistake.  If there were brave men before Agamemnon, and wise counsellors before Ulysses, there certainly have been incompetent commanders before Major-General A., and shallow statesmen before Secretary B. We do not monopolize executive imbecility, nor are our military blunders without parallel or precedent.  To attribute our occasional reverses and our indecisive victories, our inaction in the field and our confusion in the cabinet, to our peculiar form of government, is as inconsequential as it would be to trace all our disasters to the color of President Lincoln’s hair or the number of General Halleck’s children.

The enemies of free institutions, hardly yet recovered from their astonishment at beholding an army of volunteers, superior in number and quality to any the world ever saw, spring into existence with such marvellous rapidity as to eclipse, in sober fact, the fabulous birth of Minerva full-armed from the head of Jove, or their still greater surprise at seeing the immense expenses of so gigantic a war readily met without assistance from abroad, by large loans cheerfully made and heavy taxation patiently borne, are reduced to the necessity of exulting over what they term our “total want of military genius,” and our “incapacity to conduct a campaign successfully.”