14 ©f victories; it has presented the checquered aspect of successes and reverses which all wars present But we ask any dispassionate observer, looking at the war by the map, and in the fiery characters in which it is writ all over the continent—contrasting the rebellion at the start with the rebellion where it now stands—surveying this great struggle for the Union in its solid and substantial results—we ask such an observer to point out in the annals, of war where more has been done in the same period. He will find it hard to point out where as much has been done ! It is the common practice we know in war of poprdar Governments for men to belittle what has been done, to criticise and complain ; but we ask in all seriousness is it the part of dignity or of patriotism, in this crisis of our nation’s struggle, to depreciate its grand and providential achievements ? There is to a people battling in any cause a force, purely metaphysical in its character, which is yet stronger than the sinews of war— stronger than the sinews of men’s ari^s. It is courage. Never has it been more needed than of late, when a fatal paralysis has benumbed the public sense, and in the eclipse of faith, “ the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those that love the twilight, flutter about, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.” I believe we have already touched the nadir of our fears and our despondency, and that a breath of patriotism and hope is now vivifying the national pulse. But each man can swell the rising tide. To diffuse the inspiration of courage is the duty of every patriot. And happily we need draw this inspiration from no illusive fountains; for' the more earnestly and honestly we look at the situation, the more grounds of hope we find. Some of these grounds can be briefly set down: 1. The body of the rebellion is moribund. Gen. T. Seymour, whose critical habit of thought and conservative temper, add a prodigious weight to any declarations he makes on this head, states as the result of his three months’ observation in the interior of the South, that “iAe rebel cause is fast failing from exhaustion^ This is profoundly true, whether it has regard to the material resources in the South, or to the still more vital resources in men, of which the field is now reaped and bare. Every man and every boy is now in the field ; there is nothing behind. In a private letter lately written by General Grant, he used the pungent expression that the rebels have 11 robbed the cradle and. the grave to reinforce their armies.” 2. It is true, in inflicting on the rebels the immense damage 'they have received in the great campaigns of Grant and Sherman, we also have lost quite as severely—perhaps even more so; but (if it is lawfal to speak thus of so grave a matter) we can afford it. We can stand to Iq^e man for man, till every man in the armies of the rebellion is put hors du combat, and leave behind untouched a force eqyal to all we have lost in thblvar. 3. But I do not believe it will be needful to wade through such an ocean of blood as this. All that is needed is a blow that will disrupt the two main rebel armies. It is worthy of note, that the merciless conscriptions that have swept over the South have even simplified the problem for v . The war has.no longer those thousand-fold embarrassments th «t attend a national war, or war on populations. There is
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