The tremendous enthusiasm which spread over the country on the last day of August, 1862, was after all only an awakening. The extraordinary voluntary response to President Lincoln's calls for six hundred thousand men was merely a beginning. The South, in proportion to its strength did as much long ago. But the ball is rolling on and the storm grows more terrible. We have great trials, probably, still before us, but let no one despair. Out of our agony and our desperation must come victory—a dire and terrible victory it may be for us all—but it will be overwhelming, and after that victory there will be left no strength in the South to lift a hand.
And in those days the different principles involved in this war will have forced themselves so fiercely to a result that those who contended for them will seem to have acted almost as vainly as those who were such children as to resist them. What will become of the Negro if the South strives to the death, dragging the North down on and after it! What became of Serfdom during the Thirty Years' War and the other desperate and exhausting wars which followed it? What will become of Cotton if new markets are opened, as they must be? England has not realized, as we are beginning to do, that there is not, can not, and will not be a time, when both combatants, mutually wearied, must let go. Men do not weary of war; the new generation grows up fiercer than its fathers. The sooner England begins to plant her cotton in Jamaica, and Asia Minor and India, the better it will be for her. Unless we gain some extraordinary Union victories this autumn, there will be but little cotton planted next year in Dixie.
We are becoming too strong and fierce for intervention. These be the days of iron-clads and of great armies. Before England and France engage in war with a desperate nation like ours, it will be well to think twice. And we are not at the end yet.
Every man and woman in the North may as well, therefore, be warned betimes, and give all his and her aid to forwarding this war. It will not avail to be feeble, or lukewarm, or indifferent, to wish it well and do nothing, to give a little or dribble out mere kind wishes. Every one's property is at stake, or will be, and the sooner we go to work in right earnest the better. Had we one year ago done what we are even now doing—had we sprung up like a grizzly bear on a buffalo, and given it for its insolent kick a sudden, tremendous blow, tearing through its very heart, we should not have dragged out a year of doubt. It is our curse that we are always 'just a little' behind the enemy in enthusiasm. In due time we shall be in the struggle for life—the faster we advance, the better it will be for us.
On and on and on! We are marching on, and will we, nill we, must conquer or perish.
'Ye mountains that see us descend to the shore
Must view us as victors or view us no more!'
It is written that North-America is to rise purified, regenerated, and perfectly free from the most tremendous and probably exhaustive struggle in history. Believe it, you who live in it—premonitus, premunitus—'forewarned is to be forearmed.'
If President Lincoln were to call out every man in the North capable of bearing arms—according to medical judgment—between the ages of sixteen and sixty, there would be less difficulty in assembling them than in drafting a minority. If it were once realized that all must go, all would go, and with rare exceptions, right cheerfully. It is not so much the dread of battle and the trials of camp-life which keep men back as the idea that there should be any exempt. Unless the six hundred thousand be speedily brought into the field, and unless when once there, they secure us a speedy victory, the voice of the whole country will cry out for a general and unexcepted conscription.
And if so—why, then, hurrah for it! Let us show Europe and history how far a great nation can go for a great truth and for its rights. Why should we not all arise in tremendous power as whole races rose of old, and trample to the dust this insolent, slaveholding, liberty-defying foe to us and to the holiest rights of man? Such an uprising would be worthy of us—it would rank as the noblest deed of history—it would cast fresh lustre on the name, already great, of our noble President—it would be unparalleled in grandeur, in daring, and in majesty. Its very greatness would thrill the people and inspire them to do each man his utmost. Hurrah for the onward march of the millions!