TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE FALL OF RICHMOND. TIIS last victory of the North is to the South more than a great defeat. It is much that after five continuous days of battle the last effective army of the Confederacy should have been driven from its lines in such helpless rout that prisoners were taken by brigades, that the ground for forty miles was strewn with abandoned materiel, that the fugitives had not the power to turn upon cavalry worn with the fierce pursuit of hours, that nine generals are known to have been killed or captured in the retreat, and that the Commander-in-Chief with the relies of his command should be reduced to straits which make his surrender possible. It is more that the Southern soldiery should have lost their trust in that prestige of invincibility which even after Antietam at- tached to General Lee when fighting on his own ground, should feel that not even his skill can equalize the contending forces, should know that they have as little to hope from the enemy's blenders as from any failure in his resources. But nevertheless great as has been the overthrow, both these losses—that of the army and that of military confidence—might be reparable, and that of Richmond is not. Great efforts are making in this country by writers more Southern than the Southerners to show that Richmond is merely a point in space, that Lee advised its evacuation many months ago, that its fall releases the South from a burden, and sets it free for a defence suited alike to its genius and its circumstances. But so was Sebastopol a point in space, a mere fort at the extremity of a vast empire, which when the war ended had through most of its provinces never seen an invader. So had the best generals of the Czar recom- mended the evacuation of Sebastopol. But the advice was not taken, and when the fortress fell the power of Russia fell with it, for the entire strength of the Empire had been strained for its defence, 600,000 men had perished either before its walls or on their march to defend them, and when all had failed the blow fell as heavily on Archangel and Tobolsk as on "the blood-stained ruins" so many thousands of miles away. Rich- mond was the Sebastopol of the Confederacy. During the four years' siege army after army, resource after resource, general after gen^ral had been used up in defending that one city, or in other words, in holding possession of the arena selected by both sides for the grand trial of strength. In the last months of the campdign every regiment that could be procured from the West, every conscript who could be swept up among the hills of the middle region, had been collected in front of Richmond ; Mobile had been left without defenders, and the army in Tennessee without the power of movement ; Georgia had been denuded not only of soldiers, but of its whole population from eighteen to forty-five, the Carolinas had been left without garrisons, and Virginia, the first State of the South, had been so utterly exhausted that General Lee announced in a public order that unless his troops were supplied from other regions they must starve. There is not a State in the Con- federacy to which the fall of Richmond and the destruction of Lee's army do not involve the loss of the flower of its sons and an appreciable portion of all its resources for war. The " nation " which Mr. Gladstone affirmed Mr. Davis to have " made " had in fact strained its muscles to the task of holding on to its capital, and the relaxing of its grasp shows that the whole body has been enfeebled. Every blow now delivered anywhere will be but a blow in the air, the despairing effort of a brave man who feels that from head to foot his muscles have given way. It is the heart which has been paralyzed by the shock, not a finger, or even a limb.
The " nation " has, as we believe, been defeated in the defeat of its last army, and the only subject for doubt is whether it has not been also dissolved. From first to last the etrength of the South has been due to its hard, coherent organization. A few men, never thirty thousand in number, bound together by their interests and their prejudices, trained in the habit of command, and soldiers on service from their boy- hood, have ruled with unquestioned authority over a population half of whom were serfs by law, and the other half through the poverty produced by competition with unpaid toil. The coherent substance proved at first too hard for the greater but more fluid mass of the North, it cleft it as a ship cleaves the current which nevertheless is bearing it to destruction.
Throughout the war orders from Richmond have been obeyed with a promptitude and vigour which over and over again have given to the little but mobile power a visible advantage over its huge but more cumbrous rival. But this coherence depends entirely on organization, is the result of an artificial system, not of inherent strength, and that system is dissolved. When the bravest awl sebtlest intellect in the States, Mr. Davis, fled from Richm >tad he recognized the approaching destruction, not only of the nation he is said to have made, but of the organization by which he had hoped to make it. The separate States are little likely to obey a fugitive President and a wandering Congress, and nothing but obe- dience strict as that of an army can even protract the contest. There is no people to appeal to in the last resort, no possibility of an ulirising such as renewed the struggle against France in the Peninsula, for the people, the artisans and the tillers of the ground, are the inalienable friends of the invading power. Men talk of a guerilla war, but not to mention that no guerilla war ever yet in history succeeded unless aided by regular troops, who ever heard of a guerilla war with the peasantry against the guerillas ? Small bands of armed men, moving amongst friends, warned of every surprise, and wrapped by the sympathy of the people in a cloak of invisibility, may accomplish some- thing, though very little, against a modern army, but how if the. people do not sympathize, if every labourer the guerillas pass is a spy, every workman who glances at them an irreconcile- able foe, every boatman and groom and waiter and serving- woman ready to risk life to bear to the enemy tidings of their approach? Guerilla war is difficult even to a free people, simply impossible to a people encompassed by hos- tile slaves. Slavery is the Nemesis of the South. The great offence which created the war, which at every stage has- embarrassed its prosecution, which has paralyzed military genius and made heroism of no account, which has sapped an organization marvellous in its completeness and frustrated a purpose more marvellous still in its height of evil grandeur, which has rendered even the virtues useless, made patriotism dangerous, and self-devotion unwise, still clogs the feet of the South. But for slavery the war would never have com- menced; but for slavery there would have been from the first the levee en masse which, when made too late, has failed ; but for slavery the North, as Mr. Lincoln acknowledges, could not in the third year have refilled its worn battalions ; but for slavery the invaders would never have marched unopposed straight across hostile States ; but for slavery allies would have been found who could in a month have caused the recognition of the revolt; and but for slavery now the struggle need not approach its end. Slavery, as Mr. Stephens truly said, was the corner-stone of the building, and as it crumbles away the edifice erected upon it is rocking to its fall. As the coloured brigade entered Richmond, the advanced guard of a white army, the stone received the blow after which no human pewee can reconstruct even a diatnond.
The fall of Richmond is, we believe, the fall of the Con- federacy, of the Slave Empire which was to have ruled the Gulf and extended its power to the Equator, and it is not hard to form an opinion even as to the immediate course of events.. As the central power dissolves the separate States will resume their right of action, and will come in One by one. They have no terms to make, no negotiations to dawdle over, no treaty of peace either to offer or to implore. The terms are already known, and are such as involve neither humiliatioa nor any suffering beyond that which is always involved in the reparation of wrong. Each State, as it satisfies itself that the- struggle is over, has only to liberate its slaves and send its representatives to Congress and it is instantly free, free not only to control its own internal affairs, but to take its part in those of the nation against which it has just been waging war a l'outrance, free even to moderate the represeion the governing body might exercise upon its less submissive allies. President Lincoln has already offered amnesty to all persons not actually ringleaders, the Confiscation Act will be suspended for every State that submits, and the retrospective oath of allegiance can be abolished by an executive order. The North, it is evident, will exact neither blood nor fines. In the very height of its rapture at the tidings of victory, in the very moment when an excitable people might halve been expected to pour out its wrath, its leaders began to recommend still wider amnesties, and their followers broke out into hymns of thanksgiving to the Almighty. ,We do not know in the whole range of history an incident more striking than that recorded of Wall Street, that sudden uprising of the latent Puritan feeling through all the deposit with which money- seeking and war have crusted it, the money-dealers in the very temple of Mammon breaking out into a spontaneous Te Deum, pouring out the only hymn familiar to every Yankee child. The only hymn, but not the only song, for the voices which had just finished the Old Hundredth followed it with the rude strain which, better than Whittier's songs or Garrison's speeches, expresses the fall fervour of abolitionism in movement. Praise to the Lord and freedom to the slave,—those were the thoughts which came first to the hearts and lips of one of the most corrupted sections of the American democracy. Their ten- dency certainly will not be either to blood or plunder, rather their danger is of a lenity amounting to weakness, of a disposi- tion to grant away some of thir objects in the gladness of re- conciliation. The dream of their lives, the nation covering a continent and offering a refuge for every wrong, has been so close to their hearts, that they seem ready to embrace the revolutionists who shattered it because their defeat has made its realization once more possible. Their gladness is almost infantine in its demonstrativeness, but they have reason for it. If they have lost scores of thousands of their children and burdened themselves with European debt, expended four years in civil war and imposed upon themselves the curse of a standing army, they have enfranchised a race more numerous than themselves when they fought for their own freedom, removed from their country a stain which outweighed all the effects of her teaching, and taught the nations once for all the grand lesson that, be the faults of democracy what they will, at least it is not weak. Other things fell on the 4th of April besides Richmond, and among them the belief that the few may once more hope to govern the world in the interest of themselves.
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