s the Chinese Empire has
to-day is due to the Tartar cross in its blood; that is, it results from
the conquest of imbecile China by Northern Tartar tribes. One or two
more such invasions, followed by colonization of Northern emigrants,
would have made China a much stronger power this day than she is, and a
nation of higher grade. The history of Indian civilization, again, is a
history of Northern conquests. They tell us, indeed, that the Indian
castes may be resolved into so many beach-marks of the waves of
successive invasions from the North, the highest caste representing the
last innovation. When Abraham crossed from Ur of the Chaldees into
Canaan, when Cambyses broke open the secrets of Egyptian civilization,
when Alexander first opened to the world Egyptian science, these were
illustrations of the same thing,--Canaan, Egypt, and the world were all
improved by those processes. Greece died out, and has never yet
reestablished herself, because she never had a complete infusion of
Gothic blood in her worn-out system. Italy, on the other hand, had a new
birth, and at this moment has a magnificent future, because Goths and
Lombards did sweep in upon her with their up-country virtues and
wilderness moralities. What the Ostrogoths did for Spain, what the
Franks did for Gaul, what the Northmen did for England, are so many more
illustrations. What Gustavus Adolphus would have done for Germany, if he
had succeeded, would have been another.

What we are to do in the South, when we succeed, will be another. It
makes the subject of this paper.

* * * * *

Nobody pretends, of course, that War itself does anything final in the
advance of civilization. War itself is, what the poets call it, a
terrible piece of ploughing. With us, just now, it is subsoil-ploughing,
very deep at that. Stumps and stones have to be heaved out, which had
on them the moss and lichens and superficial soil of centuries, and
which had fancied, in that heavy semi-consciousness which belongs to
stumps and stones, that they were fixed forever. As the teams and the
ploughshares pass over the ground which has lain fallow so long, they
leave, God knows, and millions of bleeding hearts know, a very desolate
prospect in the upheaved furrows behind them. It is very black, very
rough, very desert to the eye, and in spots it is very bloody. This is
what war does. So desolate the prospect, that we of the Northern States
have certainly