vigorous and overwhelming
measures--and we were among them--were denounced as insane and
traitorous by the Northern Conservative press. Time was, when the
Irishman's policy of capturing a horse in a hundred-acre lot, 'by
surrounding him,' might have been advantageously exchanged for the more
direct course of going _at_ him. Time _was_, when there were very few
troops in Richmond. All this when time--and very precious time--was.

Just now, time _is_--and very little time to lose, either. The rebels,
it seems, can live on corn-meal and whisky as well under tents as they
once did in cabins. They are building rams and 'iron-clads,' and very
good ones. They have an immense army, and three or four millions of
negroes to plant for it and feed it. Hundreds of thousands of acres of
good corn-land are waving in the hot breezes of Dixie. These are facts
of the strongest kind--so strong that we have actually been compelled to
adopt some few of the 'radical and ruinous' measures advocated from the
beginning by 'an insane and fanatical band of traitors,' for whose blood
the New-York _Herald_ and its weakly ape, the Boston _Courier_, have not
yet ceased to howl or chatter. Negroes, it seems, are, after all, to be
employed sometimes, and all the work is not to be put upon soldiers who,
as the correspondent of the London _Times_ has truly said, have endured
disasters and sufferings caused by unpardonable neglect, such as _no_
European troops would have borne without revolt. It is even thought by
some hardy and very desperate 'radicals,' that negroes may be armed and
made to fight for the Union; in fact, it is quite possible that, should
the North succeed in resisting the South a year or two longer, or should
we undergo a few more _very_ great disasters, we may go so far as to
believe what a great French writer has declared in a work on Military
Art, that 'War is war, and he wages it best who injures his enemy most.'
We are aware of the horror which this fanatical radical, and, of course,
Abolitionist axiom, by a writer of the school of Napoleon, must inspire,
and therefore qualify the assertion by the word 'may.' For to believe
that the main props of the enemy are to be knocked away from under them,
and that we are to fairly fight them in _every_ way, involves a
desperate and un-Christian state of mind to which no one should yield,
and which would, in fact, be impious, nay, even un-democratic and
un-conservative.

It is true that by '