We have our opinion that the following anecdote is true. If not, it is 'well found'—or founded.
Not long since, an eminent 'Conserve' of Boston was arguing with a certain eminent official in Washington, drilling away, of course, on the old pro-slavery, pro-Southern, pro-give-it-up platform.
'But what can you do with the Southerners?' he remarked, for 'the frequenth' time. 'You can't conquer them—you can't reconcile them—you can't bring them back—you can't do any thing with them.'
'But we may annihilate them,' was the crushing reply.
And Conserve took his hat and departed.
It is, when we come to facts, really remarkable that it has not occurred to the world that there can be but one solution to a dispute which has gone so far. There is no stopping this war. Secession is an impossibility. If we willed it, we could not prevent 'an institutional race' from absorbing one which has no accretive principle of growth. It is thought, as we write, that during the week preceding July 4th, seventy thousand of the Secession army perished! They are exhausting, annihilating themselves; and by whom will the vacancy be filled? Not by the children of States which, under the old system, fell behindhand in population. By whom, then? By Northern men and European emigrants, of course.
But European intervention? If Louis Napoleon wants to keep his crown—if England wishes Europe to remain quiet—if they both dread our good friend Russia, who in event of a war would 'annex,' for aught we can see, all Austria and an illimitable share of the East—if they wish to avoid such an upstirring, riot, and infernal carnival of revolution as the world never saw—they will let us alone.
The London Herald declares that 'America is a nuisance among nations!' When they undertake to meddle with us, they will find us one. We would not leave them a ship on the sea or a seaboard town un-ruined. The whole world would wail one wild ruin, and there should be the smoke as of nations, when despotism should dare to lay its hand on the sacred cause of freedom. For we of the North are living and dying in that cause which never yet went backward, and we shall prevail, though the powers of all Europe and all the powers of darkness should ally against us. Let them come. They do but bring grapes to the wine-press of the Lord; and it will be a bloody vintage which will be pressed forth in that day, as the great cause goes marching on.
Let no one imagine that our military draft has been one whit too great. Our great folly hitherto has been to underrate the power of the enemy. In the South every male who can bear arms is now either bearing them or otherwise directly aiding the rebellion. When the sheriffs of every county in the seceding States made their returns to their Secretary of War, they reported one million four hundred thousand men capable of bearing arms. And they have the arms and will use them. It is 'an united rising of the people,' such as the world has seldom seen.