For reasons which it would take too long to tell, the power of the newspaper press in America is seized by men who are anything but practical, and who are wanting in the sense and modesty which business habits engender and encourage. The last mail of July has brought us an anecdote which tells the whole case in the briefest way. While almost every newspaper undertook to guide the President, to instruct the Cabinet, and to put the Commander-in-Chief under orders, the New York “Tribune” pushed to the front with its scheme of taking Richmond, and demolishing the rebels at once. In vain the Government held back, and the Commander-in-Chief declared that the means did not exist. The “Tribune” set up the cry “On to Richmond!” and roused the public to insist upon the attempt, by ascribing all delays to faults in the administration. The rulers set up by the people to rule were over-ruled, and the disaster at Bull’s Run is the consequence. After it happened, the Government made a strong appeal to the editor of the “Tribune” to desist from interference with its work and its responsibilities. Such an appeal, backed by the hourly arriving news of the dead and the missing, and the immeasurable disaster of the rout, might overawe any man’s pride, and touch any man’s heart; and we see accordingly a declaration in the “Tribune,” under the editor’s well-known name, that he will never more offer any kind of comment on public affairs during the struggle, but will convey to his readers nothing but news, without criticism, suggestion, or any remark whatever. It would show some sense of the greatness of the occasion if other editors, not better qualified to advise, would offer the same pledge. They, like thousands of their readers, have been mistaking sanguine imaginings, and the social vanity which belongs to self-governing peoples, for patriotic ardour, and have doubted the patriotic ardour of all who were not in as great a hurry as they were. In this connection another incident has occurred, which impressed some persons deeply long before the march to Bull’s Run.
The most experienced and thoughtful of the great Northern merchants have, from the beginning, denounced this kind of patriotic ardour, while themselves so ardent in their patriotism as to pour out their wealth into the lap of the State, and send their sons to the war when too old to go themselves. They have incessantly declared the first requisite to be “a business basis,” in contrast to an emotional one, on which to build plans and action—a policy and its methods; and, when this “business basis” was not to be had, they avowed a hope that the Northern forces would meet with “two or three defeats at the outset.” I understand, on good authority, that now they have got their wish they do not repent it. When the first desperate accounts of the rout at Bull’s Run arrived they pronounced them exaggerated—as they turned out to be; and when the full amount of the disaster became known they admitted that they could not regret it, because the alternative was of something worse. These practical sages have reason for what they feel and say. They see that the self-will which they regard with a truly republican admiration, will be turned full in the right direction,—in the direction of each man’s own duty, instead of that of other people’s. They have a warrant for their hope in their constant experience of their countrymen’s ability to set things to rights, and to learn from events. In civil life, it is remarkable how long an evil may go on unchecked in any American State; because what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business; but when some flagrant instance rouses attention, and the community gives its mind to a remedy, the remedy is the speediest and best conceivable. I remember, as one instance, the grievance of shipwrecks in a bay formed by the shores of two States. The coast of an island there was dangerous; and the pilots of each State were disagreed about their duty, and remiss in it. At last, a crowd of immigrants were drowned in a way which shocked the whole community; and a Bill was brought in and passed which contained a complete remedy in three lines. Such remedial measures in America, our lawyers say, never need recurring to. They require no botching, no supplementing, as our Acts of Parliament too often do. They may be long waited for; but, when obtained, they are found to be exactly what is wanted. Those who best know the Americans now look for a process of the same kind in military affairs first, and afterwards in political. The evil of presumption and ignorant meddling has exhibited itself in a wreck more disastrous than that in which the immigrants perished; and the scorners of discipline have proved more mischievous than pilots at feud; and the consequence already is a strong direction of the general self-will on the enforcement of discipline, and the securing of the proper conditions.
Not the less for this is the North as essentially unmilitary as the South. No degree of excellence in the army hereafter will surprise any sensible observer; but it will be of a different kind from anything that Europe has produced. We say that our soldiers are all volunteers, and we study with interest and admiration the difference between them and the automaton regiments of the Czar, where every man is not so much a machine, as a cut and dried portion of a machine, worth nothing but as it moves in its place. The difference between our troops and those which the Americans aspire to have is almost as great in their eyes as between us and the Russians. Not only is every American citizen-soldier to do his particular part well in his own place, but each is to make war on his own account, for a cause which he thoroughly understands.
So far from this being absurd, it is exactly what is now doing; but the preceding stage,—that of adequate co-operation, in other words, discipline,—is as yet deficient: and it would not have been the thing absent if the military spirit had existed. I know of nothing finer than much of the conduct of the citizen-soldiers, not only in “the uprising” (as it is, and always will be called), but in the whole march, and the battle, and I may add, the rout of Bull’s Run. I need not go back to the incidents of the muster at the President’s call; for nobody living will ever forget it: but I have caught glimpses of some of the men from the plough and the fishing-boat, and the forge and