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A Reserve force.

It is objected to the military bill lately passed by the Senate that, in ordering everybody in the country into the military service, it plays the last card of the Confederacy, and that at a period when the enemy has not begun to exhaust himself, and when our own resources of men, if deserters and stragglers are brought back to their duty, are not seriously diminished. Behold, the Yankees will exclaim, how this boasted Confederacy, at the end of three years, is on its last legs. It has used up in that short time so many of the young men of the country that it is now compelled to drag their fathers from their unprotected homes. If, in three years, we have crippled the youth and vigor of the country, how long will it take to demolish and annihilate its old age? Not more than six months at farthest, and when the old fogies are disposed of the Southern Confederacy will be bereft of its last resource of defence, and nothing will remain but for us to walk in and take possession.

But this premature exultation of the Yankees, should the Senate bill pass the House, will be without any foundation. Even when the old men are exhausted, when the fathers and grandfathers of the land are devoured by the sword, and their families exposed to famine and insurrection, there is still a resource not touched, nay, expressly exempted by the military bill of the Senate. For Congress has exampled itself and the State Legislatures from all military duty. Whilst the crisis is so urgent that gray-headed men must be forced into the ranks, it is not so urgent that members of Congress and of the Legislatures, many of them in the prime and vigor of life, should be called to the field. The object of this is patriotic, noble, and glorious. It is to form a reserve, which may rush to the resene of the country when all else has failed. When the old men of the land are exterminated, and only women and children left to occupy the farms and plantations of the country, then, in that supreme hour of peril and agony, the Spartan band of the Capitol, which has reserved itself for Thermopylae, will confront the consolidated cohorts of despotism and strike a last blow for liberty and independence. Let no one despair of the result. It is not by immense numbers or approved weapons of war that great military results are always accomplished. If a few Congressional speeches

hurried at the hordes of Lincolndom does not operate upon them like the reading of the riot act, then has hope forever left the world. But we will not allow ourselves to doubt the result. The inspiring example of Jericho overthrown by the blowing of rams'horns fills us with the most profound confidence in the Congressional Reserve.

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