fective force,
makes us regret all the more that he should have wanted the decision to
try its quality under the inspiration of attack. It is impossible that
the spirit of the army should not have been affected by the doubt and
indecision of their general. They fought nobly, but they were always on
the defensive. Had General McClellan put them at once on the
aggressive, we believe his campaign would have been a triumphant one.
With truly great generals resolve is instinctive, a deduction from
premises supplied by the eye, not the memory, and men find out the
science of their achievements afterwards, like the mathematical law in
the Greek column. The stiffness rather than firmness of mind, the
surrender of all spontaneous action in the strait-waistcoat of a
preconceived plan, to which we have before alluded, unfitted him for
that rapid change of combinations on the great chess-board of battle
which enabled General Rosecrans at Murfreesboro to turn defeat into
victory, an achievement without parallel in the history of the war.

General McClellan seems to have considered the President too careful of
the safety of the capital; but he should measure the value of
Washington by what he himself thought of the importance of taking
Richmond. That, no doubt, would be a great advantage, but the loss of a
recognized seat of government, with its diplomatic and other
traditions, would have been of vastly more fatal consequence to us than
the capture of their provisional perch in Virginia would have been to
the Rebel authorities. It would have brought foreign recognition to the
Rebels, and thrown Maryland certainly, and probably Kentucky, into the
scale against us. So long as we held Washington, we had on our side the
two powerful sentiments of permanence and tradition, some insensible
portions of which the Rebels were winning from us with every day of
repose allowed them by General McClellan. It was a clear sense of this
that both excited and justified the impatience of the people, who saw
that the insurrection was gaining the coherence and prestige of an
established power,--an element of much strength at home and abroad.
That this popular instinct was not at fault, we have the witness of
General Kirby Smith, who told Colonel Fremantle "that McClellan might
probably have destroyed the Southern army with the greatest ease during
the first winter, and without much risk to himself, as the Southerners
were so much over-elated by their eas