self, nor
allowed his generals to devise, any bold policy by which the chance
that still remained could be utilised. His energy of will showed
itself in the end in nothing but a resolution to protract bloodshed
after it had certainly become idle.

If we turn to the political conditions, on which, in any but a short
war, so much depends, the South will appear to have had great
advantages. Its people were more richly endowed than the mixed and
crudely democratic multitude of the North, in the traditional aptitude
for commanding or obeying which enables people to pull together in a
crisis. And they were united in a cause such as would secure the
sustained loyalty of any ordinary people under any ordinary leader.
For, though it was nothing but slavery that led to their assertion of
independence, from the moment that they found themselves involved in
war, they were fighting for a freedom to which they felt themselves
entitled, and for nothing else whatever. A few successful encounters
at the start tempted the ordinary Southerner to think himself a better
man than the ordinary Northerner, even as the Southern Congressmen felt
themselves superior to the persons whom the mistaken democracy of the
North too frequently elected. This claim of independence soon acquired
something of the fierce pride that might have been felt by an ancient
nation. But it would have been impossible that the Northern people as
a whole should be similarly possessed by the cause in which they
fought. They did not seem to be fighting for their own liberty, and
they would have hated to think that they were fighting for conquest.
They were fighting for the maintenance of a national unity which they
held dear. The question how far it was worth fighting a formidable
enemy for the sake of eventual unity with him, was bound to present
itself. Thus, far from wondering that the cause of the Union aroused
no fuller devotion than it did in the whole lump of the Northern
people, we may wonder that it inspired with so lofty a patriotism men
and women in every rank of life who were able to leaven that lump. But
the political element in this war was of such importance as to lead to
a startling result; the North came nearest to yielding at a time when
in a military sense its success had become sure. To preserve a united
North was the greatest and one of the hardest of the duties of
President Lincoln.

To a civilian reader the history of the war, in spite