Now a word as to the southern railroads. Next to the navigable rivers they were the lines of easiest penetration to invaders. Remember how the British in 1898 advanced in Africa only as they completed their railroad behind them. Of course had the railroad been already made their advance would have been along it. How could Sherman have ever crossed the devastated tract from Dalton to Atlanta had he been without the railroad behind him? During his retreat Johnston kept the invading army between himself and the railroad without which it could not have been subsisted, and staid so close that Sherman had him constantly in view; conduct which is still lauded by some people in the south as masterly beyond compare. To conceive more vividly the river and railroad situation which I am striving to explain, suppose that during the Revolutionary war the States had been as dependent as the south afterwards became upon rivers and railroads, and the British had and the Americans did not have iron-clad gunboats; as matters now look, our forefathers would have been beaten back to the foot of the throne. I believe that the railroads alone would have rendered their subjugation certain. So much for the matchless judgment shown by the directors in deciding as to the time of the war. I shall now tell what I have long thought is most unmistakably their work in conducting that war. As soon as secession was an accomplished fact, they deprived the better southern statesmanship of all guidance of the brothers' war now inevitable and about to begin. In such a war a proper executive is of far more importance than good legislators and even good generals. Toombs was the man who stood forth head and shoulders above all others as the logical president of the southern confederacy. But the wily directors hypnotized the electors into believing that Davis, because of his military education, service in Mexico, and four years' secretaryship of war, was the right man. It is generally believed in the south that the considerations just mentioned turned the scale in favor of Davis. But sometimes I think that the true explanation is different. Stephens has told how Toombs was got out of the way. When this narrative[111] was published, both Toombs and Davis, with many of the partisans of each were alive, and regard for them may have kept him silent as to a reported mischance to Toombs, which provoking opposition--as was whispered--from some of those who had been among his most earnest supporters, decided him to retire. A biographer writes: "There was a story, credited in some quarters, that Mr. Toombs's convivial conduct at a dinner party in Montgomery estranged from him some of the more conservative delegates, who did not realize that a man like Toombs had versatile and reserved powers, and that Toombs at the banquet board was another sort of a man from Toombs in a deliberative body."[112]