3 extreme. We &re given over to a despondency quite as unwarrantable as the extravagance of our early hopes. We demanded and expected impossibilities. Forgetting that the age of miracles has passed, many are now bitterly complaining that nothing has been accomplished, and predicting that all future efforts will terminate in similar failure. Two years have not elapsed since the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter; and yet we are amazed and mortified that our forces have not overrun the whole South, that victory has not crowned our arms in every battle, and that our flag does not float triumphant over every acre of every State once called Confederate. Whether this most desirable result could have been accomplished, if this or that policy had been adopted at the outset, is one of those problems that will never be solved ; nor is the inquiry at present pertinent or profitable. Let us rather ask whether, in view of the means actually employed, our discontent with the existing condition of affairs is not unmanly and unreasonable. We are to measure results, not by the efforts that we ought to have put forth, nor by those which we should put forth, if, with our dear-bought experience, we were called upon once more to undertake such a gigantic enterprise. We must recall the aspect of affairs when we first embarked on this perilous sea. We must remember how ignorant we were of all the danger before us, how imperfect was the chart by which our course was to be determined, how many shoals and sunken rocks and cross-currents we were to encounter, as yet unknown to any pilot on board our noble ship of state, how little we knew of navigation in such angry waters, under sc stormy a sky. Turn back the pages of history for two short years, and dwell a moment on the picture presented to our eyes. A nation, enjoying to the utmost the substantial benefits belonging to fifty y< ars of profound peace and unexampled prosperity, enervated by those habits of luxury which wealth easily accumulated always fosters, with a standing army hardly largo enough to protect our Western frontier from the incursions of hostile Indians, and a navy ludicrously small in proportion to the extent of our sea-coast and the value of our commerce, is suddenly pl tinged into a war covering such an extent of territory, and calling fur such an array of power by sea and land as to dwarf
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