The object of the war.
--As the war began, so it has continued.
The
North has fought to subjugate the
South if she could, to devastate it if she could not. The South has fought solely in self-defence.
There has never been a moment at which she would not gladly have accepted peace; there has never been a moment at which peace was in any sense within her reach.
Three times the Confederate Government has attempted to negotiate, and three times its envoys have been insolently repulsed.
It has never done any act calculated, by retaliating on Northern soil the crimes and cruelties perpetrated by Northern troops in the
South, to make negotiation difficult or peace unpopular.
The Southern people have shown the world that their subjugation is impossible.
They have maintained their independence and protected their capital against enormously superior numbers; and without sustaining a single defeat approaching the character of a disaster, they have, on half a dozen distinct occasions, inflicted a total and crushing overthrow upon the main armies of the
North.
With every year of the war their strength has increased and their courage has risen; their determination grows daily more stubborn and their devotion more perfect and unanimous; and, in the words of the manifesto, the world must see that such a people cannot be conquered.--The hopelessness of the
Northern cause is recognized by all except its most devoted partisans.
At the same time, all are aware that it rests with the
North alone to terminate the struggle.
Victory does not increase the demands of the
South any more than defeat could reduce them.
She asks only to be let alone; she wishes for nothing except the withdrawal of Northern troops from her soil and Northern cruisers from her waters.
Peace, therefore, requires only that the aggressors should abandon the hope of reducing free States, inhabited by an English population, to a hateful servitude; and it ill becomes the
European Powers to encourage that hope, and prolong the war, by withholding a diplomatic acknowledgment of the universal conviction that the independence of the
South is virtually an accomplished fact.--
London Standard. 
