party in direct sympathy with the aims and purposes of the enemy—­blusters and intrigues.  President Lincoln meets with the same embarrassments in connection with this party that Pericles met in his campaigns against Sparta:  it was his coming into power that precipitated the violence of war; his determined action against all sympathizers with the enemy draws down upon him the intensified wrath of these sympathizers; the generals whom he sends into the field, if, like Alcibiades, they are characterized by any spirit in their undertakings, are trammelled with political entanglements and rendered useless, while some slow, half-brained Nicias, with no heart in the cause, is placed at the head of expeditions that result only in defeat.

There is the same diffusiveness connected with our military plans which characterized the operations of the Athenians against Sparta.  We do not make the special advantage which we have over the South through our naval superiority available against her special vulnerability.  We intimidate her, as Pericles did the Peloponnesians, by circumnavigating her territories with a great display of our naval power; we effect a few landings upon her coasts; but all these invasions lead to no grand results, they do not subdue our armed enemy.  What with these errors in the general conduct of the war, and the lack of energy which characterizes every part, our prospects of ultimate success are fast being ruined.  Unless some change be quickly effected, unless political sentiment can be made to give place to the original enthusiasm with which we commenced the war, and this enthusiasm be embodied in military enterprise, our case is a hopeless one.  One the other hand, if things go on as they have been going on, the political opposition to the war will rise to such a height as to overturn the Administration, and in its place install those who are desirous of a reconstruction of the Union on a Southern basis.  The same errors on the part of Athens led to just this result in Greece; an oligarchy came at last to rule even over the democratic city itself.  The consequence was the downfall of Greece, and in her ruin was demonstrated the failure of ancient civilization.  In a like event, nothing could save us, nothing could save modern civilization, from the same disastrous ruin.

The barbarism which at successive intervals in history has swept southward over Asia was, at the least, something fresher and better than that which it displaced.  The Gothic barbarians were, in very truth, the scourges of God to the inferior and more despicable barbarians of Southern Europe.  The former exemplified a barbarism unconscious of itself, and carrying in its very rudeness the hope of the world; and the more complete and overwhelming its revolutions, the more glorious the promise involved in them.  But, from the establishment over a continent of a system so deliberately barbarous that it dares to array its brutal features against the sunlight of this nineteenth century,