ates should be left unprotected. To apply Frederick the
Great's maxim* requires greater strength of will in the statesman
than in the soldier. (* "A defensive war is apt to betray us into too
frequent detachments. Those generals who have had but little
experience attempt to protect every point, while those who are better
acquainted with their profession, having only the capital object in
view, guard against a decisive blow, and acquiesce in smaller
misfortunes to avoid greater." Frederick the Great's Instructions to
his Generals.) The cries and complaints of those who find themselves
abandoned do not penetrate to the camp, but they may bring down an
administration. It is easy to contrive excuses for the inaction of
the President, and it is no new thing to find the demands of strategy
sacrificed to political expediency. Nor did the army which had
suffered so heavily on the banks of Bull Run evince any marked desire
to be led across the Potomac. Furloughs were liberally granted.
Officers and privates dispersed to look after their farms and their
plantations. The harvests had to be gathered, the negroes required
the master's eye, and even the counties of Virginia asked that part
of the contingents they had furnished might be permitted to return to
agricultural pursuits.

The senior generals of the Virginia army were not alone in believing
that the victory they had won would be barren of result unless it
were at once utilised as a basis for further action. Jackson,
engrossed as he was with the training of his command, found time to
reflect on the broader aspects of the war. Before he left for the
Shenandoah Valley he sought an interview with General G.W. Smith,
recently appointed to the command of his division. "Finding me lying
down in my tent," writes this officer, "he expressed regret that I
was sick, and said he had come to confer with me on a subject of
great importance, but would not then trouble me with it. I told him
that I wished to hear whatever he desired to say, and could rest
whilst he was talking. He immediately sat down on the ground, near
the head of the cot on which I was lying, and entered on the subject
of his visit.

"'McClellan,' he said, 'with his army of recruits, will not attempt
to come out against us this autumn. If we remain inactive they will
have greatly the advantage over us next spring. Their raw recruits
will have then become an organised army, vastly superior in numbers
to our own. We are