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THE CONQUEST OF CUBA.

One hundred years ago the people of America were as much moved by martial ardor as are the American people of to-day.  The year 1762 was, indeed, a far more warlike time than was 1862.  “Great war” is now confined to the territory of the United States, and exists neither in Asia, Africa, nor Europe.  Garibaldi’s laudable attempt to get it up in Italy failed dismally.  There was a flash of spirit, and there were a few flashes of gunpowder, and all was over.  “The rest is silence.”  There are numerous questions unsettled in the Old World, but the disputants are inclined to wait for settlement, it would seem, until our affairs shall have been brought into a healthful state.  Europeans complain that our quarrel has wrought them injury, and very great injury, too.  They are right as to the fact.  England has suffered more from the consequences of the Southern Rebellion than have the Free States of the Union, and France quite as much, and Spain as severely as any one of our States.  In Germany, in Switzerland, and in Belgium, thousands of families have had bitter reasons for joining in the cry that Americans do not know how to manage their politics.  We have heard of riots in Moravia, not far from the scene of Lafayette’s imprisonment and that of Napoleon’s greatest victory, caused by the scarcity of cotton.  Yankee cloths that used to go into remote and barbarous regions, through the medium of the caravan-commerce, will be known no more there for some time.  Perhaps those African chiefs who had condescended to shirt themselves, thus taking a step toward civilization, will have to fall back upon their skins, because Mr. Jefferson Davis and some others of the Southern Americans chose to make war on their country, and so stop the supply of cotton.  The “too-many-shirts” cry, which so revolted the benevolent heart of Mr. Carlyle twenty years since, has ceased to be heard.  The supply is getting exhausted.  The old shirts are vanishing, and the new ones, instead of being of good stout cloth, are of such stuff as dreams are made of.  There might be a new version of “The Song of the Shirt” published, specially adapted to the state of the times, and which would come home to the bosoms and backs of many men.  Mr. Davis’s war may be considered as a personal one against all civilized men, for it affects every one’s person.  The great civil war between Charles I. and the English Parliament was in part caused by soap, which the monopolists made of so bad a quality that it destroyed the clothes which it should have cleaned.  Of “the monopolers and polers of the people,” as he called them, Sir John Culpeper said, “We find them in the dye-fat, the wash-bowl, and the powdering-tub.”  As a monarchy was made to fall through the monopoly of soap and other ordinary articles, so was it purposed that a republic should be crushed through the monopoly of the material from which the sheets and shirts of