15 no population. Our task is confined to beating the armies at Richmond and Atlanta. For the rest, the southern people are tired of the war, and are sighing for peace. 4. In a military point of view,?such is the situation held by Gen. Grant and Gen. Sherman, toward’the insurgent forces opposed to them, that the reinforcements they are receiving, will certainly enable them soon to complete their work. Gen. Seymour on this head, says : “There is but one course consistent with safety or honor. Let the people awake to a sense of their dignity and strength, and a few months of comparatively trifling exertion—of such effort as alone is worthy of the great work— and thh rebellion will crumble before us. Fill this draft promptly and willingly, with good and true men ; send a few spare thousands over rather than under the call, and the summer sun of 1865 will shine upon a regenerated land” 5. The war is really near its close. The present front of the rebellion, menacing though it be, is i eally nothing more than a mask, concealing the hollowness and rottenness within. The South is literally exhausted—exhausted of that without which it is impossible to<carry on war—exhausted of men. The field, in the impressive expression of Napoleon regarding France after her three conscriptions, is reaped down to the stubble. Out of, an available fighting population of upwards of three-quarters of a million with which the war was inaugurated, they have saved an effective force of one hundred or one hundred and fifty thousand men. The rest are in their graves, in the hospitals, disabled, or prisoners in our hands. These are the forlorn hope of the rebellion. 6. Our territorial conquests have reclaimed three-fourths of the area originally claimed in the limits of the Confederacy. The Confederacy stands now thrice bisected—its great lines of communication cut or in our hands. Besides, its resources of all kinds are all but exhausted. The desperate men at its head may continue the struggle for some time longer—they may for a while oppose a formidable front to our blows—but the rebellion is doomed. Its struggles will be the frantic final efforts of the gladiator before he falls down exhausted and exanimate. 7. The leaders of the rebellion have ceased to see any hope for their cause in the arena of war. They are looking now to the arena of politics. A party has been set up whose creed and aims have their entire sympathy and moral support. Hie platform of that party has noising but expressions of contumely for the sacred war, the recital of which has been made 5 for Jeff. Davis and his crew it has nothing but expressions of-sympathy and respect. The people of the North have now before them the momentous question of determining by teir action whether tirey wiM justify all the precious blood shed in this war by carrying; it triumphantly through and crowning it wafch & gforibus and honorable peace, or whether by a base surren they w"' ’"project it into history as the monument of a nation’s folly.
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