Desolution of Southern homes.
A Northern journal, commenting on the long-expected advance of
McClellan, declares with complacency that ‘"it will spread weeping and wailing through many a Southern household."’
This is an aspect of the invasion peculiarly agreeable to Northern imaginations.
The idea of widows and children through a whole land raising the piteous cry of bereavement, is one which all belligerents, except only the heavenly-minded people of the
North, endeavor to hide from their own views and dismiss from their own contemplations as far as possible.--We have never heard, in all the wars of history, of an enemy who, however eager to annihilate the opposing combatants, ever solaced its imagination with the anticipated anguish of their desolated households.
There is something in this consequence of war so distressing to the sternest heart that, so far from dwelling upon it with satisfaction, and much more speaking of it with pleasure, brave men steel their minds against the thought, or if it finds entrance there, it is only to melt their own souls in sorrow over the calamities upon the weak and dependent they are compelled to inflict.
We do not believe there is a Southern man, we have not heard of one, in the unrestrained freedom of private conversation, although the
South is standing on the defensive, and engaged in the holy cause of protecting its own firesides and altars from desolation, express a sentiment so fiendish as that we have quoted from a Northern journal.
It is in keeping, however, with a race which has made women and children targets for its soldiery and victims of cruel imprisonment and outrage.
Demoniac must be the nation which can look forward with exultation to the idea of weeping and lamentation more bitter than that of
Ramah, caused by the butchery of the brothers, sons, fathers, and husbands of a people whom they still claim as their own countrymen!
How precious, priceless, and glorious a Union, which can only be preserved and cemented by such sacrifices — a Union of wholesale murderers, with the dead bodies and broken hearts of a desolated land!
