13 in which the enemy’s force was driven from a succession of strongholds looked upon as impregnable, at length planted his army in front of Atlanta. Here he was thrice assailed by an enemy willing to lavish everything in the desperate effort to drive him back. - JThe enemy thrice met a bloody repulse. Sherman now began working slowly but surely round on the rebel communications, not with a view to take. Atlanta simply, but for the purpose of capturing the rebel army—a result from which Hood has only been saved by a precipitate flight from Atlanta—thus abandoning the foremost city of the Southwest, and the important communications it commands. In the engagement which resnlted in-this brilliant success, the rebels lost two thousand prisoners and very heavily in killed and wounded. It may now be safely said that Hood’s force, as am army, no longer exists. In this great campaign General Sherman has put hors du combat over forty thousand men, that is, more than half the army opposed to him, besides affecting great captures in men and material. General Grant has planted his army before Petersburg and on the communications of Richmond, after a campaign of even greater magnitude, marked by the most terrible and continuous fighting on record. During its progress he has gained a dozen victories, any one of which 7 would have sealed the fate of any European war. Its course has been marked by the constant use of those double instruments of war—strategy and what,Wellington called “hard pounding;” by the former he has driven the enemy, by bloodless victories on our part, from six chosen lines of defense; by the latter he has put out of the way between fifty and sixty thousand of the fighting veterans of the South. In addition he has taken over twenty-five thousand prisoners, and a prodigious number of guns. He is certain, ere long, to crown his work by the capture of the rebel capital and the destruction of the main rebel army. Finally, while the situation is as thus presented at the main points of war, the progress of our arms by land and sea shows equal lustre wherever they meet the foe. It is but the other day that Admiral Farragut capped the climax of his great achievements by the capture of the forts guarding the entrance to Mobile bay, the destruction or capture of the enemy’s powerful fleet in those waters—thus sweeping away, it is believed, the last vestige of rebel naval power on the coast of the Atlantic and the Gulf. From the high seas, teo, the rebel naval power has been swept. It is but the other day that its most formidable embodiment, the Alabama, was sent to the bottom by the Kear- sage, affording a significant lesson both to the rebels and to the British allies who have furnished them with that and ether proofs of their material support. VIII. # GROUWS OF COURAGE AND CONFIDENCE. After such a retrospect cf the glorious achievements of our army and navy, have we not a right to ask, with some emphasis, of those who complain of the slew progress of the war, and fear its indefinite prolongation, what substantial ground they have for then -repining ? It 18 true the course of the war has not been an uninterrupted succession
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