t if they did, they have now met their match in audacity of
falsehood. Captain Bobadil in the play, who submitted a plan of killing
off an army of forty thousand men by the prowess of twenty, each man to
do his twenty _per diem_ in successive single combats, might have raised
his proposed score of heroes among any handful of Secessionists. There
seems to be no one to stop these prodigious fellows as a party of
Buford's men were once checked by their commander, in the writer's
hearing, on their way down the Missouri River, in 1856. "Boys," quoth
the contemptuous official, "you had better shut up. Whenever we came in
sight of the enemy, you always took a vote whether to fight or run,
and you always voted to run." Then the astounding tales they have told
respecting our people, down to the last infamous fabrication of "Booty
and Beauty," as the supposed war-cry for the placid Pennsylvanians!
Booty, forsooth! In the words of the "Richmond Whig," "there is more
rich spoil within a square mile of New York and Philadelphia than can be
found in the whole of the poverty-stricken State of Virginia"; and the
imaginary war-cry suggests Wilkes's joke about the immense plunder
carried off by some freebooter from the complete pillage of seven Scotch
isles: he reembarked with three-and-sixpence.

It might not be wise to claim that the probable lease of life for our
soldiers is any longer than for the Secessionists, but it certainly
looks as if ours would have the credit of dying more modestly. Indeed,
the men of the Free States, as was the wont of their ancestors, have
made up their minds to this fight with a slow reluctance which would
have been almost provoking but for the astonishing promptness which
marked their action when once begun. It is interesting to notice how
clearly the future is sometimes foreseen by foreigners, while still
veiled from the persons most concerned. Thus, twelve years before the
Battle of Bunker's Hill, the Duc de Choiseul predicted and prepared for
the separation of the American colonies from England. One month after
that, the Continental Congress still clung to the belief that they
should escape a division. And so, some seven years ago, the veteran
French advocate Guepin, in a most able essay suggested by the "Burns
affair" in Boston, prophesied civil war in America within ten years.
"_Une grande lutte s'apprete donc_," he wrote; "A great contest is at
hand."

Thus things looked to foreigners, both in 1775