armies. It has been drawn from the whole population, and every class, and all forms of business, and all mechanical arts have their representatives in every Northern regiment. Such an army is not a mere aggregation of human puppets or machines under the direction of an engineer in shoulder-straps, but it is a body of thousands of individual thinkers, combining thought, skill, and experience, for a common purpose. A majority of Northern regiments could furnish from their ranks mechanics that could build or repair a locomotive, or construct a bridge or a steamboat, or repair a watch; and with them are associated lawyers, and physicians, and ministers, printers, editors, painters, and authors. No army ever gathered before has embodied such an amount of educated, thinking power, and such a variety of gifts and attainments.

It is not only a fighting engine, but it is a thinking machine of the highest order. And precisely those qualities from which the aristocrats of Europe, and the slave-lords of the South, predicted its ruin, have made it the most admirable army of the world. They predicted that such men would not fight. The slave-owner, blinded by his own false system, believed that common soldiers must be half-brute, half-savage, in order to be brave, and that an officer must be a tyrant in order to command.

The nobility of Europe have adopted a military maxim suited to their ideas of man, and their false notions of courage: "the worse the man the better the soldier," and, therefore, they, too, believed that the men of the North. would not fight, and would be scattered by the fiery onset of a Southern army. They forgot that the highest forms of courage, the sternest and most persistent bravery, spring directly from intelligence and principle. They ought to have known that these are stronger than passion, or hate, or revenge. They thought that these freemen of the North, accustomed to no restraint, and insisting upon thinking for themselves, would submit to no discipline, and that the Northern army would be only an armed mob. The first letter-writers and observers from Europe, having

known only the machine-movements of military puppets, saw only tumult, disorder, and inefficiency in the Northern troops.

They knew nothing of the true nature of freedom. They ought to have known that what they saw, and censured so eagerly, were indications of real power, and that the intelligence of these men would, of itself, soon render them the most obedient of soldiers, because they would obey from principle, and as a means of safety and success.

Perhaps the peculiar and sterling qualities of American troops have never been exhibited under circumstances which could test more severely the spirit of men, than by the Army of the Potomac. Since its first organization after the battle of Manassas, it has shown no cowardice, no faltering in the face of an enemy, nor in the perform ance of any duty; it has fought more than half of the great and bloody battles of the war, and, though never wholly defeated, it has never been completely victorious. Victory, fairly earned by its own valor, has been repeatedly lost to them by the incompetency or treachery of some of its commanders, and yet it has maintained its faithfulness, its discipline, its courage, and its confidence in itself and

in its cause.

Its steadfast courage is based on intelligence and principle, and therefore it survives disaster, and springs up afresh after the severest disappointment. The career of the Army of the Potomac is, in many respects, a mortifying one, and yet it is a very noble exhibition of the mili tary capabilities and qualities of the freemen of the North, and to it yet may be given, as its final reward, the crowning victories of the war.

These qualities have been exhibited in a more brilliant light by the armies of the West, because they have been more ably and faithfully led, and therefore led to victory. Many suppose there are marked differences between Eastern and Western troops. The freer, more expansive life of the West gives somewhat more, perhaps, of impetu osity to the men of the West; but wherever Eastern and

Western troops have been associated, they blend at once into one homogeneous mass, and all differences vanish, and no one could tell, from their manner of fighting, whether they came from the prairies or the New England hills.

Eastern and Western soldiers have fought under very similar circumstances, with results so similar as to forbid either boasting or complaint. They sustained alike the honor of our flag. Gettysburg and Chickamauga were not only the great battles of the war, but, in each case, the best troops of the South were matched against the best of the North. The North and the South were fairly represented on these bloody fields, and the main features of the fighting were the same. One was fought mainly by Eastern troops, and the other mostly by soldiers of the West. In each battle the fiery and yet orderly rush of the Southern veterans, led by their most trusted generals, was checked and rolled back with terrible slaughter by the persistent firmness, the long-enduring courage and skill of the Northern troops; and the two battles were a true type of the war.

The Southern charge comes with the sweep and roar of a headlong torrent, but the Northern lines are granite, upon which it dashes and breaks. The men of the West fought, it is true, under great disadvantage at Chickamauga. They were outnumbered nearly two to one from the first, according to the statement of General Rosecrans, and nearly half of the army on the second day was shaken from its position; but the left, under Thomas, showed the true qualities of Northern soldiers, by hurling back charge after charge of Longstreet's chosen men, the very elite of the Southern army, and in numbers more than double their own, and compelling them to withdraw after five hours of the bloodiest fighting of the war.

In these two battles the fighting qualities of the North and South were tested, with the advantage of numbers on the side of the South, and with results that show the superior steadfastness and endurance of Northern troops. The

South will not believe, hereafter, that it can beat a Northern army on an equal field.

Nor are Northern soldiers at all deficient in those quali ties which most distinguish the armies of the South. The storming of Fort Donelson, the rush of Grant's army round to the rear of Vicksburg, and the running of the batteries at New Orleans, Port Hudson, and Vicksburg, have not been matched by any Southern exploit, while the history of war scarcely shows any thing more brilliant than the dash up the steeps of Mission Ridge, and the storming of Lookout Mountain. The South has performed nothing which can bear comparison with these, and the military superiority of the North has, at length, been fully estab lished.

The conclusion, then, which is fairly reached from the facts presented, is, that the American nation will be able, at any time after this rebellion is over, to command an army, in numbers, in variety of its qualifications, and in effective power, that will, to say the least, be second to that of no other nation, and abundantly sufficient for our complete protection. With this army, and with our new navy, with exhaustless supplies of all kinds, whether of food or munitions of war, with railways and navigable rivers which enable us to concentrate troops and supplies when and where they are needed, we shall come forth from this struggle a great military power, quite able not only to defend ourselves from attack, but to compel the powers of Europe to relinquish all pretensions to this Western World.

There are many, who are decidedly in favor of prosecuting the war until the last vestige of rebellion is swept away and the authority of the government is re-established over every foot of our territory, who, nevertheless, are exceedingly anxious in regard to the future, expecting, after the close of the war, a long period of depression for every branch of industry, and general commercial disaster. They know that the country will then be burdened with an enormous debt, and they think that the South, being

desolated by the war, the supply of her great staples cut off, the producing power of the North largely diminished by the destruction of life, our resources in measure exhausted, and our currency at the same time largely inflated, there must be a season of universal prostration and embarrassment.

Others, however, take a far more hopeful view of the future, and believe that the country will pass out of the war almost immediately into a more prosperous state than it has ever known. It is admitted that the South will be left by the war a comparative desert; that she will be stripped of nearly all the accumulations of her previous life; she will be destitute of almost every article that belongs to civilized life.

war.

The land, however, remains undiminished in fertility, and even refreshed by its rest, and the laborers of the South have been mostly preserved, by the good providence of God, amid the ravages of the war, and that which oppressed labor and hindered production has been taken out of the way. It can not be doubted that, so soon as the labor system of the South can be reorganized upon the principles of a free society, the production of Southern staples will be increased far beyond what it was before the And when we consider that this reorganization has already begun, and is making rapid progress; that thousands of plantations of sugar and cotton will be wrought by free laborers this very year; and that this process of reconstruction will go forward almost equally with the progress of the war, it will be seen that, immediately and before the war closes, the great staples of the South will begin to reappear in the markets of the world. As fast as territory is reconquered and made secure, it will be occupied by the superior producing power of free labor, and the prosperity of peace will thus gradually return with the decline of the war, and there will be no abrupt and disastrous transition from a state of war to a condition of peace. The waste of the South is, indeed, to be repaired; her railroads are to be reconstructed and furnished anew; tools