ave not and can not establish a real _superiority_ of
strength, and yet have voluntarily forced upon a stronger opponent a war
which must become deadly.

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 on