Our Successes not unnatural.
Lord Palmerston, in one of his late speeches, represented the turn which the war in this country had taken as altogether without precedent. He no doubt, had placed implicit confidence in the reiterated promises of Seward to put it down in the next ninety days, and, like Hickman, believed that 20,000,000 were able to best 7,000,000. In forming this opinion he seems to have deliberately shut his eyes to all the lessons of history; and if history be what Lord Bolingbroke defines it to be — philosophy teaching by examples--Lord Palmerston is assuredly not such a statesman as ought to be at the head of a Government like that of Great Britain.While there have been many examples of successful resistance to the invasions of nations more powerful than the invaded there have been remarkably few instances of a successful invasion where the war was national on the part of the people threatened with subjugation. Where the invaded people depend upon a great standing at my, and that army is defeated and destroyed, it is natural enough that they should submit. They have generally little public spirit, and probably think themselves likely to be as well off under one ruler as under another. But where the heart and soul of every man is enlisted in the cause, subjugation is impossible. A people thus united in love of their own country and hatred of the invader may be defeated in a score of bloody battle, but they think no more of submission the day after a defeat than they do the day after a victory. They may be exterminated, but they cannot be conquered.--Hundreds of instances supporting the truth of this position might have been found by Lord Palmerston, if he had taken the trouble to look for them.
Xerxes invaded Greece with 2,600,000 fighting men; the largest army of which we have any account. His camp followers amounted to as many more. He thus precipitated five or six millions of human beings upon a knot of little republics, whose united population probably did not amount to the number he brought with him. Yet he sustained the most disastrous defeat and the most entire overthrow that any invader ever met with. The Gauls, for centuries, were in the habit of hurling their masses by hundreds of thousands upon the Roman Republic, always with the same result. The sparsely settled island of Corsica set the powerful Republic of Genoa, backed at one time by the whole force of the Spanish monarchy, at defiance for three hundred years. Two hundred years of war did not enable England to conquer Scotland, though her population was six times as great. Napoleon could overrun, but he could not conquer Spain. All continental Europe combined could not conquer Prussia when Frederick the Great guided her destinies.
Why should Lord Palmerston suppose we are easier to conquer than any of these? Our men are as brave as the best of them all. The Yankees are not better soldiers than the Gauls, or the Genoese, or the Spaniards, or the French, or the English were. The disproportion of numbers is not so great as it was in any of the cases mentioned. The Yankees are not more than three to one. When our negroes are taken into the account — and they should be, for they till the ground, and thereby enable those who would otherwise be compelled to stay at home to take the field — they are not more than one and a half to one. In every battle — on fair ground — we have in the meantime beaten them one to three. Upon what rational ground, then, can Lord Palmerston rest his astonishment at the turn things have taken?
