helplessness of its predecessor.  But now their pride was too deeply outraged for endurance, indignant remonstrances were heard from all quarters, and the Government seemed for the first time fairly to comprehend that it had twenty millions of freemen at its back, and that forts might be taken and held by honest men as well as by knaves and traitors.  The nettle had been stroked long enough; it was time to try a firm grip.  Still the Administration seemed inclined to temporize, so thoroughly was it possessed by the notion of conciliating the Border States.  In point of fact, the side which those States might take in the struggle between Law and Anarchy was of vastly more import to them than to us.  They could bring no considerable reinforcement of money, credit, or arms to the rebels; they could at best but add so many mouths to an army whose commissariat was already dangerously embarrassed.  They could not even, except temporarily, keep the war away from the territory of the seceding States, every one of which had a sea-door open to the invasion of an enemy who controlled the entire navy and shipping of the country.

The position assumed by Eastern Virginia and Maryland was of consequence only so far as it might facilitate a sudden raid on Washington, and the policy of both these States was to amuse the Government by imaginary negotiations till the plans of the conspirators were ripe.  In both States men were actively recruited and enrolled to assist in attacking the capital.  With them, as with the more openly rebellious States, the new theory of “Coercion” was ingeniously arranged like a valve, yielding at the slightest impulse to the passage of forces for the subversion of legitimate authority, closing imperviously so that no drop of power could ooze through in the opposite direction.  Lord de Roos, long suspected of cheating at cards, would never have been convicted but for the resolution of an adversary, who, pinning his hand to the table with a fork, said to him blandly, “My Lord, if the ace of spades is not under your Lordship’s hand, why, then, I beg your pardon!” It seems to us that a timely treatment of Governor Letcher in the same energetic way would have saved the disasters of Harper’s Ferry and Norfolk,—­for disasters they were, though six months of temporizing had so lowered the public sense of what was due to the national dignity, that people were glad to see the Government active at length, even if only in setting fire to its own house.

We are by no means inclined to criticize the Administration, even if this were the proper time for it; but we cannot help thinking that there was great wisdom in Napoleon’s recipe for saving life in dealing with a mob,—­“First fire grape-shot into them; after that, over their heads as much as you like.”  The position of Mr. Lincoln was already embarrassed when he entered upon office, by what we believe to have been a political blunder in the leaders of the Republican Party.