Poverty of the Confederates.
The Yankee journals are excessively jocular over the straits to which the
Confederates are put for food, clothing, and various innumerable articles of household and personal use and comfort.
It does their excellent hearts good to imagine us all ragged and starving.
They have no higher idea of human happiness than to possess the belly of a hog and the fleece of a sheep.
They have no faith in anything which composes the inside of a man except his intestines, and if these are daily crammed with codfish and chowder they permit the soul to take care of itself.
Most of them have little belief in a soul of any kind, rationally refusing to recognize the existence of that which they have no evidence of in their own consciousness.
If it gives these refined and benevolent people any satisfaction to know that we have not as much to eat and drink as themselves, we will not withhold from them the admission that it is even so; that, though no starving, we are living on Spartan diet; that, though not naked, we are far from wearing purple and fine linen.
We are almost in as doleful plight for food and raiment as the
Americans of the first Revolution.
But if we have laid aside every weight, it is that we may be prepared for the race; if we are stripped of raiment, we are more ready for the fight; and all our privations are only the rigid training that the pugilist undergoes to prepare him for the decisive struggle.
When one of the most celebrated of British actors was exhibiting to
Dr. Johnson his magnificent house and gardens, the sage only observed: "Ah, my good friend, these are the things that make a death bed terrible." To keep under the body and bring it into subjection is one of the most effectual modes of disarming death of its terrors and exalting to its true dignity the soul of man.--A people steeped to the cyclids in sensual indulgence could never achieve success in a contest like that which now shakes this continent.
The bravest of all the
Generals were those who lived on as short commons as the Southern Confederacy.
The Army of
Italy was such a ragged and doleful looking set of ragamuffins that
Napoleon, when he took command, was only less astonished at their gaunt appearance than they were at the slight and half fed look of the stripling who commanded them.
But no other French army ever achieved such prodigies as that famished crew, and the shadow of
Napoleon's glory grew smaller as his body waxed fat. Our own army, never surpassed in its valor by Greeks or Frenchmen, seems to lose its vim when it crosses to
Maryland and
Pennsylvania, and forages luxuriously in the rich larders of the enemy.
They fight their best when they have little to eat or wear, whilst the
Yankees, who come over here to invade us with fine clothes on their backs, and their carcases reeking with the fat of the land, fall an easy prey to the gaunt and fierce warriors whose souls are unclogged by physical indulgences, and who have nothing of that aversion to death which is engendered by sensual enjoyment.
Let the
Yankees beware of the half starved wolf!
Let them realize that, if they have loosened for us most of the ties which make men cling to life, they have only made us more dangerous enemies.
We owe them a long and heavy account.
We shall endeavor to pay it up in full.
The day of reckoning is coming, and they will then discover that the moderation which we have hitherto exhibited under such wrongs as humanity has rarely been called upon to endure was the result of anything but fear.
