ur overweening confidence we neglect discipline, underrate the prime
importance of promptness and decision in action, certainty and celerity
in movement, and energy and activity in pursuit,--if, in a word, we
expect that the defences of the enemy are to fall into our hands by
means as unwarlike as those that decided the fate of Jericho, or dream
that because our cause is just every precedent in history and every
principle in human nature will be overruled in our favor,--then we
deserve to be outgeneralled, and are fortunate, if we escape final and
disastrous defeat.

Now has not this been precisely our cardinal and capital error, and
are we not to-day suffering its natural consequences? To the blind and
unreasoning confidence with which we began this war has succeeded a
reaction running into the very opposite extreme. We are given over to
a despondency quite as unwarrantable as the extravagance of our early
hopes. We demanded and expected impossibilities. Forgetting that the age
of miracles has passed, many are now bitterly complaining that nothing
has been accomplished, and predicting that all future efforts will
terminate in similar failure. Two years have not elapsed since the first
gun was fired at Fort Sumter; and yet we are amazed and mortified that
our forces have not overrun the whole South, that victory has not
crowned our arms in every battle, and that our flag does not float
triumphant over every acre of every State once called Confederate.
Whether this most desirable result could have been accomplished, if this
or that policy had been adopted at the outset, is one of those problems
that will never be solved; nor is the inquiry at present pertinent or
profitable. Let us rather ask whether, in view of the means actually
employed, our discontent with the existing condition of affairs is not
unmanly and unreasonable. We are to measure results, not by the efforts
that we ought to have put forth, nor by those which we should put forth,
if, with our dear-bought experience, we were called upon once more to
undertake such a gigantic enterprise. We must recall the aspect of
affairs when we first embarked on this perilous sea. We must remember
how ignorant we were of all the danger before us, how imperfect was the
chart by which our course was to be determined, how many shoals and
sunken rocks and crosscurrents we were to encounter, as yet unknown
to any pilot on board our noble ship of state, how little we knew of
nav