th the size of their
dominions, and their extraordinary material progress is not much more
than a scratch on the surface of the continent. In Europe Nature has
long since receded before the works of man. In America the struggle
between them has but just begun; and except upon the Atlantic
seaboard man is almost lost to sight in the vast spaces he has yet to
conquer. In many of the oldest States of the Union the cities seem
set in clearings of the primeval forest. The wild woodland encroaches
on the suburbs, and within easy reach of the very capital are
districts where the Indian hunter might still roam undisturbed. The
traveller lands in a metropolis as large as Paris; before a few hours
have passed he may find himself in a wilderness as solitary as the
Transvaal; and although within the boundaries of the townships he
sees little that differs from the England of the nineteenth
century--beyond them there is much that resembles the England of the
Restoration. Except over a comparatively small area an army operating
in the United States would meet with the same obstacles as did the
soldiers of Cromwell and Turenne. Roads are few and indifferent;
towns few and far between; food and forage are not easily obtainable,
for the country is but partially cultivated; great rivers, bridged at
rare intervals, issue from the barren solitudes of rugged plateaus;
in many low-lying regions a single storm is sufficient to convert the
undrained alluvial into a fetid swamp, and tracts as large as an
English county are covered with pathless forest. Steam and the
telegraph, penetrating even the most lonely jungles, afford, it is
true, such facilities for moving and feeding large bodies of men that
the difficulties presented by untamed Nature have undoubtedly been
much reduced. Nevertheless the whole country, even to-day, would be
essentially different from any European theatre of war, save the
steppes of Russia; and in 1861 railways were few, and the population
comparatively insignificant.

The impediments, then, in the way of military operations were such as
no soldier of experience would willingly encounter with an improvised
army. It was no petty republic that the North had undertaken to
coerce. The frontiers of the Confederacy were far apart. The coast
washed by the Gulf of Mexico is eight hundred miles south of Harper's
Ferry on the Potomac; the Rio Grande, the river boundary of Texas, is
seventeen hundred miles west of Charleston on th