has proved too easy.  We give our Southern army,—­for we must remember that it is our army, after all, only in a state of mutiny,—­we give our Southern army credit for excellent spirit and perseverance in the face of many disadvantages.  But we have a few plain facts which show the probable course of events; the gradual but sure operation of the blockade; the steady pushing back of the boundary of rebellion, in spite of resistance at many points, or even of such aggressive inroads as that which our armies are now meeting with their long lines of bayonets,—­may God grant them victory!—­the progress of our arms down the Mississippi; the relative value of gold and currency at Richmond and Washington.  If the index-hands of force and credit continue to move in the ratio of the past two years, where will the Confederacy be in twice or thrice that time?

Either all our statements of the relative numbers, power, and wealth of the two sections of the country signify nothing, or the resources of our opponents in men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than our own.  The running sand of the hour-glass gives no warning, but runs as freely as ever when its last grains are about to fall.  The merchant wears as bold a face the day before he is proclaimed a bankrupt, as he wore at the height of his fortunes.  If Colonel Grierson found the Confederacy “a mere shell,” so far as his equestrian excursion carried him, how can we say how soon the shell will collapse?  It seems impossible that our own dissensions can produce anything more than local disturbances, like the Morristown revolt, which Washington put down at once by the aid of his faithful Massachusetts soldiers.  But in a rebellious state dissension is ruin, and the violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the pressure on every inch of the containing surface.  Now we know the tremendous force which has compelled the “unanimity” of the Southern people.  There are men in the ranks of the Southern army, if we can trust the evidence which reaches us, who have been recruited with packs of blood-hounds, and drilled, as it were, with halters around their necks.  We know what is the bitterness of those who have escaped this bloody harvest of the remorseless conspirators; and from that we can judge of the elements of destruction incorporated with many of the seemingly solid portions of the fabric of the rebellion.  The facts are necessarily few, but we can reason from the laws of human nature as to what must be the feelings of the people of the South to their Northern neighbors.  It is impossible that the love of the life which they have had in common, their glorious recollections, their blended histories, their sympathies as Americans, their mingled blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and protected by it the world over, their worship of the same God, under the same outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same ecclesiastical organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing