d Nicias, with no heart in the cause, is placed at
the head of expeditions that result only in defeat.

There is the same diffusiveness connected with our military plans which
characterized the operations of the Athenians against Sparta. We do not
make the special advantage which we have over the South through our
naval superiority available against her special vulnerability. We
intimidate her, as Pericles did the Peloponnesians, by circumnavigating
her territories with a great display of our naval power; we effect a
few landings upon her coasts; but all these invasions lead to no grand
results, they do not subdue our armed enemy. What with these errors
in the general conduct of the war, and the lack of energy which
characterizes every part, our prospects of ultimate success are fast
being ruined. Unless some change be quickly effected, unless political
sentiment can be made to give place to the original enthusiasm with
which we commenced the war, and this enthusiasm be embodied in military
enterprise, our case is a hopeless one. One the other hand, if things go
on as they have been going on, the political opposition to the war will
rise to such a height as to overturn the Administration, and in its
place install those who are desirous of a reconstruction of the Union on
a Southern basis. The same errors on the part of Athens led to just
this result in Greece; an oligarchy came at last to rule even over the
democratic city itself. The consequence was the downfall of Greece, and
in her ruin was demonstrated the failure of ancient civilization. In
a like event, nothing could save us, nothing could save modern
civilization, from the same disastrous ruin.

The barbarism which at successive intervals in history has swept
southward over Asia was, at the least, something fresher and better than
that which it displaced. The Gothic barbarians were, in very truth,
the scourges of God to the inferior and more despicable barbarians of
Southern Europe. The former exemplified a barbarism unconscious of
itself, and carrying in its very rudeness the hope of the world; and the
more complete and overwhelming its revolutions, the more glorious the
promise involved in them. But, from the establishment over a continent
of a system so deliberately barbarous that it dares to array its brutal
features against the sunlight of this nineteenth century, that it dares
even to oppose itself, with a distinct confession of its base purposes,
against