The "World" on Pope.
--The New York World, which welcomed Pope as ‘"one of our greatest Generals,"’ has an article on Stuart's dash at Manassas, headed ‘"Our Great Reverse in Virginia"’ It says:‘ It is for the President to decide what punishment is due for this culpable and most disastrous negligence. If it be true that the President has said that ‘"Gen. Pope was celebrated for three things — great brains, great indolence, and a want of strict veracity,"’ the loss of public confidence in that General's telegrams will not bias his judgment unduly. He will be unaffected also by — perhaps he is unaware of — his extreme unpopularity with nearly all his subordinate Generals, officers and men. He will give just weight to the bad generalship which left the gallant Gen. Banks to be defeated at Cedar Mountain, for it is incredible that he can have been deceived by the telegrams with which it was attempted to amuse and appease the public, or that General Pope's act in returning to his brigade commanders the lists of killed, wounded, and missing sent in by them, as incorrect and exaggerated, can have blinded the President's eyes any more than it did theirs to the measure of our disaster and the plentiful lack of generalship which caused it. The President knows, also, how the discipline of Gen. Pope's army has deteriorated since he took the field. He knows the causes of this deterioration, and the country will confidently hope that these, too, will have just weight in his decision upon the future command of the army of Virginia.
The Government, we repeat, is imposing upon the country the utmost sacrifice in an intolerable suspense and anxiety, so that the enemy may get no information which could be of value to them from correspondents, whose only office is to convey to the people what they have an undoubted right to know of the brothers and sons whom they have sent to fight the battles of the nation. --Yet here is a General guilty of the grossest carelessness in the holding of that information, and directly as the result of that carelessness the enemy is made acquainted with all that they could possibly desire to know, to enable them to countervail our plans, defeat our armies, and capture our capital.
It is outrageous and intolerable, and the President may be assured that the indignation which he must feel in his own high place of knowledge and power, at such incompetency and shameful carelessness, is more than shared by the people whose destinies hang upon the fidelity and success with which he chooses the instruments to wield the vast power committed to his hand.
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