And

landholders on the one side and manufacturers and merchants on the other. The bulk of the population, North and South, are holders of land, while the average size of the holdings of land under cultivation is probably greater in the Free than in the Slave States. The largest single estate in the country is, we believe, in Illinois. Generalizations are commonly unsafe in proportion as they are tempting; and this, together with its pretty twin-brother about Cavaliers and Roundheads, would seem to have been hatched from the same egg and in the same mare's-nest. If we should take the statements of Dr. Cullen and Mr. Smith O'Brien for our premises, instead of the manifest facts of the case, our conclusion in regard to Ireland would be an anachronism which no Englishman would allow to be within half a century of the actual condition of things. yet could the Irish revolutionists of thirteen years ago have had the advantage of a ministry like that of Mr. Buchanan, - had every Irish officer and soldier been false to his honor and his allegiance, -had Ireland been supplied and England stripped of arms and munitions of war by the connivance of the Government, the riot of 1848 might have become a rebellion as formidable as our own in everything but territorial proportions. Equally untrue is the theory that our Tariff is the moving cause of Southern discontent. Louisiana certainly would hardly urge this as the reason of her secession; and if the Rebel States could succeed in establishing their independence, they would find more difficulty in raising a national revenue by direct taxes than the North, and would be driven probably to a tariff more stringent than that of the present United States. If we are to generalize at all, it must be on broader and safer grounds. Prejudices and class-interests may occasion temporary disturbances in the current of human affairs, but they do not permanently change the course of the channel. That is governed by natural and lasting causes, and commerce, in spite of Southern

Commercial Conventions, will no more flow up-hill than water. It is possible, we will not say probable, that our present difficulties may result to the advantage both of England and America: to England, by giving her a real hold upon India as the source of her cotton-supply, and to America by making the North the best customer for the staple of the South.

We believe the immediate cause of the Southern Rebellion to be something far deeper than any social prejudice or political theory on the part of slaveholders, or any general apprehension of danger to their peculiar property. That cause is a moral one, and is to be found in the recklessness, the conceit, the sophistry, the selfishness, which are necessarily engendered by Slavery itself. A generation of men educated to justify a crime against the Law of Nature because it is profitable, will hardly be restrained long by any merely political obligation, when they have been persuaded to see their advantage in the breach of it. Why not, then, at once lay the axe to the root of the mischief? Why did not England attack Irish Catholicism in 1848 ? Why does not Louis Napoleon settle the Papal Question with a stroke of his pen? Because the action of a constitutional government is limited by constitutional obligations. Because every government, even if despotic, must be guided by policy rather than abstract right or reason. Because, in our own case, so much pains have been taken to persuade the people of some peculiar sanctity in human property, and to teach them the duty of yielding their moral instincts to their duty as citizens, that even the Free States are by no means ripe for a crusade. The single and simple duty of the Government is to put down resistance to its legitimate authority; it meddles, and can meddle, with no claim of right except the monstrous one of rebellion. An absolute ruler in advance of his people has been more than once obliged to abandon his reforms to save his throne; a popular government which should put itself in the same position might endanger not only its own

hold upon power, (a minor consideration,) but, in such a crisis as ours, the very frame of society itself. We must admit that the administration of Mr. Lincoln has sometimes seemed to us overcautious; that, while it has not scrupled, and wisely has not scrupled, to go behind the letter of the law to its spirit, in dealing with open abettors of treason in the Free States, because they were perverting private right to public wrong, it has been as scrupulous of meddling with a rebel's legal right in man, though that man were being used for a weapon or a tool against itself, as if to touch it were anathema. The divinity, which is only a hedge about a king, becomes a wall of triple brass about a slaveholder.

But while we should prefer a more daring, or at least a more definite policy on the part of the Government, we do not think the time has come for turning the war into a crusade. The example of saints, martyrs, and heroes, who could disregard consequences because the consequences concerned only themselves and their own life, is for the private man, and not for the statesman who is responsible for the complex life of the commonwealth. To carry on a war we must have money, to get money we must have the confidence of the money-holders, who would not advance a dollar on a pledge of the finest sentiments in the world. There is something instructive in the fate of that mob of enthusiasts who followed the banner of Walter the Penniless, a name of evil omen.. It saves trouble to say that we must fight the Devil with fire; though, when the Devil is incarnate in human beings, that policy has never been very successful at Smithfield or elsewhere. But in trying the fiery cure of a servile insurrection, we should run the risk of converting the whole white population of the South into devils of the most desperate sort, with whom any kind of reconciliation, even truce, would be impossible.

We hope and believe that the end of this war will see the snake of Slavery scotched, if not killed. Events move, Jowly, to be sure, but they move, - and

the thought of the people moves with them unconsciously to fulfil the purposes of God. Government can do little, perhaps, in controlling them; but it has no right to the power it holds, if it has not the insight and the courage to make use of them at the right moment. If the supreme question should arise of submitting to rebellion or of crushing it in a common ruin with the wrong that engendered it, we believe neither the Government nor the people would falter. The time for answering that question may be nearer than we dream; but meanwhile we would not hasten what would at best be a terrible necessity, and justifiable only as such. We believe this war is

to prepare the way for the extinction of Slavery by the action of economical causes, and we should prefer that solution to one of fire and blood. Already the system has received a death-blow in Maryland and Missouri. In Western Virginia it is practically extinct. If the war is carried on with vigor, it may become so before long in East Tennessee. Texas should be taken possession of and held at any cost, and a territory capable of supplying the world with cotton to any conceivable amount thrown open to free labor.

However regarded, this war into which we have been driven is, in fact, a war against Slavery. But emancipation is not and could not be the object of the war. It will be time enough to consider the question as one of military necessity when our armies advance. To proclaim freedom from the banks of the Potomac to an unarmed, subject, and dispirited race, when the whole white population is in arms, would be as futile as impolitic. Till we can equip our own army, it is idle to talk of arming the slaves; and to incite them to insurrection without arms, and without the certainty of support at first and protection afterward, would be merely sacrificing them to no good end. It is true, the war may lack the ardent stimulus that would for a time be imparted to it by a direct and obvious moral purpose. But we doubt whether the impulse thus gained

would hold out long against the immense practical obstacles with which it would be confronted and the chill of disappointment which is sure to follow an attempt to realize ideal good by material means. Nor would our gain in this respect more than compensate for the strength which would be added to the rebels by despair. It is a question we have hardly the heart to discuss, where our wishes, our hopes, almost our faith in God, are on one side, our understanding and experience on the other.

Nor are we among those who would censure the Government for undue leniency. If democracy has made us a goodnatured people, it is a strong argument in its favor, and we need have no fear that the evil passions of men will ever be buried beyond hope of resurrection. We would not have this war end without signal and bitter retribution, and especially for all who have been guilty of deliberate treachery; for that is a kind of baseness that should be extirpated at any cost. If, in moments of impatience, we have wished for something like the rough kingship of Jackson, cooler judgment has convinced us that the strength of democratic institutions will be more triumphantly vindicated by success under an honest Chief Magistrate of average capacity than under a man exceptional, whether by force of character or contempt of precedent.

Is this, then, to be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel about Cotton? Shall there be nothing to

enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism? Are we to have no Cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold? -no Cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours. Not only is it national life and a foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God's own hand. If democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this cardinal truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great for its defence and establishment, then democracy will have vindicated itself beyond all chance of future cavil. Here, we think, is a Cause the experience of whose vicissitudes and the grandeur of whose triumph will be able to give us heroes and statesmen. The Slave-Power must be humbled, must be punished, — so humbled and so punished as to be a warning forever; but Slavery is an evil transient in its cause and its consequences, compared with those which would result from unsettling the faith of a nation in its own manhood, and setting a whole generation of men hopelessly adrift in the formless void of anarchy.

The Armies of Europe: Comprising Descriptions in Detail of the Military Systems of England, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sardinia, adapting their Advantages to all Arms of the United States Service; and embodying the Report of Observations in Europe during the Crimean War, as Military Commissioner from the United States Government in 1855-56. By GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN, Major-General U. S. Army. Originally published under the Direction of the War Department, by Order of Congress. Illustrated with a Fine Steel Portrait and Several Hundred Engravings. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 8vo.

Ir is an interesting study to examine into the causes or motives which have produced military books of the higher order; for we are thus vouchsafed an insight into the writer's genius, and an intelligence of the circumstances amidst which he wrote, and of which he was often an important controller. The Archduke Charles wrote his "Grundsätze der Strategie," etc., as a vindication of his splendid movements in 1796, against the French armies of the Rhine and the Sambre-et-Meuse; and it has remained at once a monument to his achievements and a standard text-book in military science. Marmont, the Marshal Duke of Ragusa, collecting the principles of the art of war from "long and frequent conversations with Napoleon, twenty campaigns, and more than half a century of experience," has given us, in his "Esprit des Institutions Militaires," a condensed view of his own military life, as complete, if not as pleasantly diffuse, as his large volumes of "Mémoires." Jomini, from an extended experience, and a study of the genius of Napoleon, which his Russian position could never induce him to undervalue, has produced those standard works which must always remain the treasure-houses of military knowledge. We admire veracity, but let no soldier confess that he has not read the "Vie Politique et Militaire," and the "Précis de l'Art de la Guerre." But, in all these cases, the litera

In 1855, Mr. Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, sent a military commission to Europe, composed of Major Delafield of the Engineers, Major Mordecai of the Ordnance, and Captain McClellan, just promoted from a Lieutenancy of Engineers to a Captaincy in the Cavalry. Major Delafield was charged with the special subject of Engineering; Major Mor decai with Ordnance and Gunnery; and to Captain McClellan was assigned the duty of a general report upon the Organization of Armies, with a special bearing upon the formation of Infantry and Cavalry. Each of these gentlemen has written a book, and that of McClellan, originally published as a Report to the Secretary of War, in unmanageable quarto, and at a more unmanageable price,-is now issued, in the volume before us, with the very appropriate title, "The Armies of Europe," and in a convenient form for the eye and the purse.

spot, procured all the books of Tactics, Regulations, Military Laws, etc., and provided himself with such models of arms, equipments, saddles, bridles, tents, etc., as were easily transported. Operations of a difficult and laborious character, such as carrying horses on shipboard, are fully demonstrated with diagrams. Marches, manoeuvres, detachments, battles, are fully discussed. Such investigations, when the French, Italian, or German language was the medium, were comparatively easy; but in order to give a proper comparative view, he was obliged also to study Russian, which he did successfully; by this means he has given us a masterly summary of the Russian system, with its immense battalions, its thousands of military schools, and its Cossack skirmishers, of wonderful endurance and formidable fierceness.

The volume is a complete description in detail of the principal armies, and of wider scope than would be expected; for, while the author has been very full upon the special topics assigned him, which did not include the duties of Engineers and Engineer Troops, it is easy to see every where that these latter would intrude themselves with the siren charms of a first love, and nothing but the record could dissolve the spell. Indeed, he urgently recommends to the Government the organization of Engineer troops, specifying their equipments, points of instruction, and duties. In this department, his description of Military Bridges is of great value. Incident to the faithful descriptions contained in the Report, and by far the most valuable feature of the work, we would specify his comments upon all that he saw. They are manly and bold, but raisonnés and just. They give token of that originality of thought which we call genius. The opening chapter on the Crimean War is the only fair critique of that gallant, but mismanaged campaign we remember to have seen. The author's object is to exhibit the movements of both Allies and Russians

"As truth will paint them, and as bards will

not."

When McClellan's work first appeared, the "Athenæum" took up spear and shield; but, selon conseil, McClellan declined to reply, and the champion fought the air, without injuring the record.

A prime interest attaches to this work, because, unconsciously, the author has given us, in advance, his repertory of instruments and principles. From the written word we may anticipate the brilliant achievement, while in every case the action may be tested by a reference to the recorded principle.

The retirement of Scott places McClellan in a position where he will have neither partner nor censor in his plans and movements. The graceful and appropriate manner in which the old veteran leaves the field, which age and infirmity will no longer allow him to command, is but a fitting prelude to the military rule of one upon whose brow the dew of youth still rests, and who brings to his responsible task the highest qualities, combined with a veneration for the noble virtues and an emulation of the magnanimous career of his predecessor, at once honorable and inspiring.

Spare Hours. By JOHN BROWN, M. D., Author of "Rab and his Friends." Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 16mo.

IT has not yet been satisfactorily explained why doctors are such shrewd and genial men, and, when they appear in the literary field, such charming writers. This is one of the curious problems of the day, and undoubtedly holds its own answer in solution, but has not yet seen fit to make an observable precipitate. Perhaps this is because the times are stirring, and the facts cannot settle. A delightful exhibition is made of something extremely good to take, which we swallow unscrupulously : in other words, we can only guess how many scruples, and of what, this blessed medicine for the mind contains. As it is eminently fit for every American to have an hypothesis upon every subject, we might now, with proper recklessness, rush into print with a few unhesitating suggestions upon this singular phenomenon of doctors gifted and graceful with the pen.

We observe, at any rate, that it is something independent of climate and locality, and not at all endemic. Otherwise it might be true that the restless and inquisitive climate of the Atlantic coast, which wears the ordinary Yankee to leanness, and "es