of the Southern conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will
not say of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as the
representative of a party whose leaders, with long training in
opposition, had none in the conduct of affairs; an empty treasury
was called on to supply resources beyond precedent in the history
of finance; the trees were yet growing and the iron unmined with
which a navy was to be built and armored; officers without
discipline were to make a mob into an army; and, above all, the
public opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced with every vague
hint and every specious argument of despondency by a powerful
faction at home, was either contemptuously sceptical or actively
hostile. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter
element of disintegration and discouragement among a people
where every citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is a
reader of newspapers. The peddlers of rumor in the North were the
most effective allies of the rebellion. A nation can be liable to no
more insidious treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly
its electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the
community, till the excited imagination makes every real danger
loom heightened with its unreal double.

And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the problem
to be solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its immediate
relations and its future consequences; the conditions of its solution
were so intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable and
uncontrollable contingencies; so many of the data, whether for hope
or fear, were, from their novelty, incapable of arrangement under
any of the categories of historical precedent, that there were
moments of crisis when the firmest believer in the strength and
sufficiency of the democratic theory of government might well hold