THE PROGRESS OF E VENTS IN AMERICA.
1VIR. LINCOLN can wait. By the law to which he appeals, he is bound to allow "illegal combinations" twenty days before he disperses them by force. The time of grace expires on the 5th of May, and until that date the President will continue his preparations without intermission and without bravade. Though without an army, and almost without a fleet, he is still the chief of a great military race, and the force which is rapidly assembling at his call would be formidable in a European war. In addition to the seventy- five thousand men already summoned, forty thousand more have been demanded, and are to be enlisted for three years, the most formidable announcement we have yet received. It looks as if the President, who at least is aware of his own will, were contemplating a war which will last for three cam- paigns. The regular army, shattered to pieces by defections, by the retirement of Southern officers, and by the treachery of individuals like Twiggs, is to be reinforced instantly to twenty-five thousand men, who, it must be remembered, will not have the Southern frontier to defend.
Rumours are afloat of a still more decisive increase to the regular army, while volunteers, enlisted for no definite period, continue to pour in. These calls are in no sense formal, for the number asked for is invariably supplied with a rapidity and ease which reminds European observers rather of an Austrian conscription than an enlistment of free soldiers. Surprise at the numbers, however, disappears, when it is re- membered that the American people, though equal in number to those of England and Wales, have not yet raised an army exceeding our volunteers. It is the willingness of the people which is marvellous. The summons to the first Mas- sachusetts regiment reached Boston in the evening, and was not in circulation till full midnight. At daybreak the regiment had cleared the town in its march on Wash- ington, enthusiasm having remedied every want. Ten thou- sand men are now collected within the capital, ten thousand more are marching through Pennsylvania and Maryland, and not one Western man has yet arrived. The scarcity of arms, though not yet serious, is beginning to be felt, but orders of imperial magnitude have been forwarded to Europe, and the local factories are in a condition of fierce activity.. Colonel Colt, in particular, whose loyalty had been ques- tioned, has equipped an entire regiment with repeating rifles. Money is forthcoming in any amount. The Herald esti- mates the amount already given by individuals at five and a half millions of dollars, and this is independent of the State and Federal contributions. The marine department, though not quite so talkative—for private enterprise cannot make a Navy—is equally earnest in preparation. The Federal squa- drons have not arrived, but orders have been issued to en- list eighteen thousand sailors, to equip everything in the shape of a steamer that will float, and to secure as many private vessels as their owners can be induced to lend. As yet it is impossible to form even an idea of the fleet at the President's disposal; but it seems certain that he has six or seven war vessels of some size, and an unlimited force of transports, but a great deficiency of small steamers capable of being armed. Already Charleston and the Virginian ports are effectually blockaded, and the mouth of the Potomac is said to be swarming with small vessels. No order seems to have been given about privateers, and it is possible that in the face of the European decision on this point the President prefers for the present to retain all available maritine force in his own hand.
Mr. Lincoln, as we have said; waits, and the constitutional delay has encouraged the belief, still popular in England, in the possibility of compromise. Despite the barometer, a lull is taken for the cessation of the storm. Reports of ne- gotiations, overtures, armistice, are freely repeated, and the terms of agreement discussed as if a conference were at hand. Most of these prophecies are dictated by a secret sympathy with the South, but all, whether honest or only intended to embarrass, are, we believe, equally without foundation. It is, we repeat, impossible for the two parties even to negotiate until their comparative strength has been defined. There is no locus standi for peaceable discussion. Nobody supposes, we presume, that the Pre- sident intends to give up Washington, or discuss terms in which that proposal is included. But to retain Washington Maryland must be retained, and Maryland is not yet aware that her function in politics is for the present quiet obedience. Nor can the President, if so inclined, surrender Western Virginia, which is as free as New York, to the clutches of slaveholders eager to avenge her treason to the South. Yet her old spirit has departed strangely out of the Old Dominion if she submits to see her territory partitioned without a stroke in its defame. These States are as tenacious of their boundaries as any European kingdom, and the right of villages to secede, though a logical consequence of Calhoun's principles, is not yet admitted even by the South. Mr. Lincoln, more- over, has announced pretty openly his view of the first campaign. He intends to enforce the right of way through Baltimore in such style that the question shall not be again raised during the war. He will retake Harper's Ferry, Fort Monroe, and Norfolk in Virginia, and exact the restoration of the materiel plundered thence, and now stored up in Richmond. And then, with Maryland, Delaware, and Vir- ginia finally detached from the South, he will announce the next object of the campaign. This programme is scarcely favourable to compromise, and the people, the only authority superior to the President, seem as little disposed to treat. Their real leaders, indeed, amazed at the unanimity which prevails, are lending their ears more and more readily to the counsel of those who would terminate not only the quarrel but its cause. The country folk of the North are fairly roused, and they add to the fixed will of the English people something of the vindictiveness which marked the race they have supplanted. They look on the quarrel, not as we are =hued to do, as a fit of irresistible ill-temper, but as the natural outburst of a sore festering for thirty years. This generation has grown up hearing only of slavery, seeing every consideration kept down by fear of emancipation, listening to stories of horrors done on the border land by slaveowners, brooding over a sullen resolve, if ever the out- break should arrive, to end the peril once for all. The hour has now arrived, and the quiet men who in six hours had exchanged their beds for marching order, will not be daunted by the length of the conflict or the results it may involve. But we shall be told, if the North will not yield, the South may. Already, Mr. Davis, who was just now so loud about his visit to the Capitol, pledges himself only to resist the subjugation of the South. As Virginia is included in the South, and the partition of Virginia is a certainty, that menace does not bear its English interpretation. It 'still means war, though it assumes that the cause of war is a just right of self-defence. That the planters are taken by surprise at the attitude of the North is probable, but their leaders always expected war, and cowardice is never the vice of an aristocracy of race. They could obtain no terms which would leave slavery anything but a tolerated nuisance, and they will, unless their character mid their means have been alike misjudged, submit as yet to none. When slave property is valueless, compromise, based on the surrender of guarantees for slavery will be possible, but scarcely before. It is difficult, futile as speculation on such a point must be, not to speculate on the character of the virtual leaders in this war. Mr. Davis seems intelligible enough,—a man with the power which ability, unchecked by scruples or by fear, must always yield ; but Mr. Lincoln is more difficult to read. Five-sixths of the speeches attributed to him are inventions as baseless as any Belgian canards. He is a silent man, too, lacking in a very remarkable degree the American faculty of effective declamation. Even his acts may be interpreted on two hypotheses, his decision being always hampered by more or less of formula.. He levies an army as he would call out the posse commitatus, declares civil war by a notice against illegal combinations, and subjugates a State by a legal plea in favour of a right of way. But we see no act of his which indicates vacillation, and incline, under the evidence as yet produced, to believe him equal to the situation. He is, we suspect, a great man after the American type. An English statesman in his position would have been content to know that his own will was fixed, and gone straight forward, without a thought of the popular view of his resolve. American statesmen are drilled out of individuality, and Mr. Lincoln, with a will of iron and a heart to face all difficulties, still waited for the people. The silent masses have spoken at last, and Mr. Lincoln, confident of the one judgment which he fears, has in all subsequent acts shown himself as inflexible as a Czar. A little letter has just been published from Mr. Seward, the " compromising" Secretary of State, which, to our thinking, lets a flood of light upon the character of the President. He was asked about some proposed armistice, and replied : " That sort if business ended on 4th March."
The Union is indivisible now as when the inaugural address was spoken, be the consequences of the doctrine what they may.
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