Doc.
184.-American affairs in Germany.
It is not to be denied, that, from a military point of view, the rebels in the
United States have just now several great advantages over the
Government.
They have an ably organized army, which has been trained for several months, and which must needs fight and plunder in order to be kept together; while the
Government can oppose to their attacks only raw and undisciplined troops.
Moreover, as the war is to be carried on in the border slave States and in the southern ports, the
Government troops will suffer from the summer heats, which do not so affect the secessionists.
It is, therefore, quite possible that the first results will be in favor of the rebels.
We have, however, no doubt that intelligence and enduring strength are on the side of the
Government, and that victory cannot but remain with the loyal side.
We judge from the recent news that the people of the
North have at last learned to recognize and value justly the objects and power of the rebels, who threaten their national existence; and we believe that the
North is now determined never to lay down its arms till the authority of the law is once more restored in all the seceded
Sates, and the
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political power of slavery, which has grown to so mischievous a strength, is destroyed.
Twenty-three millions of people, strengthened by all the arts of peace, and possessed of inexhaustible resources, are opposed to three hundred l and fifty thousand slaveholders, four millions of slaves, and three millions of poor whites, who, with the exception of a few cities, are thinly scattered over a broad space of country, and are accustomed to the most primitive and unsocial conditions of life.
The whole civilized world has an interest in this war. It is a war which the people of the
Northern States, conservative by the nature of their industrial and political habits, could not longer put off; and it is a war which under perhaps other names many a nation of
Europe will have to take up in its turn.
It is with them (the
United States) as with us: the feudalism of the middle ages is arrayed in arms against the citizenship of the nineteenth century; an exploded theory of society is lifting up its head against the triumphs of our thinking industrial and progressive century;
the poverty-struck Don Quixotes of the Southern plantations gave battle to the roaring windmills and smoking chimneys of the wealthy North. It is the supercilious noble in arms against the spirit of the century, in which the
citizen is supreme.
In such an issue we can wish success only to the constitutional Government.--
Cologne Gazette, May 5.
