NEED TO PLEAD.
Without enlarging upon the point or using the abundant material to be had from English and American literature, we stop a moment for one or two evidences that these writers have need to plead their cause by such means as they can devise. The chairman of this committee on one occasion, being in England, heard a number of British officers of high rank, especially engaged in the study of military history, express their opinion—which we rejoice to recognize, and which these Northern men dread as the world's final verdict—that while Washington, Lee, and Jackson were of the great leaders of the world's history, the North had never produced a great commander; that Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan were not to be thought of; that the renegade Virginian, Thomas, was the only man on the Northern side who had approached that rank. On another occasion, travelling in New England, he encountered a gentleman who declared himself a student of history, and desired to be told how it happened that in every crisis of the country's history he found five times as many Southern men as Northern prominently managing affairs. He knew, he said, that the time would come when—utterly wrong and unjust, as he thought it—all the romance and glory of this war would gather around Lee and Jackson, and not around Grant and Sheridan. The passing years already prove the soundness of his judgment. Well may they dread to appear at the bar of their own consciences. With respect to their latest act of war, giving the suffrage to the blacks—a deed unsurpassed for hypocrisy as to purpose, malignant intent, and disastrous effect upon all concerned—these writers know that their best men are uniting to condemn it, and will ere long confess that it was indeed conceived in iniquity and born in sin, and is now itself yielding a legion of devils armed to torment the State. Alas! that teachers in our Southern States should, through any mistake of judgment or counsel, join the North in teaching that, as far as we are the sufferers, we reap the due reward of our deeds.
FISKE'S HISTORY.
Now, to return and deal with the particular books we were set to examine:
