Through the evening silences which followed the evacuation of Fort Sumter, April 14, 1861, were heard at Montgomery and in other Confederate cities rhetorical voices of gratulation at the humbled pride, flag, and prosperity of the North, and predictions of bold equestrian sallies into Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston; at the North, wails of sorrow, sudden questions of the causeless blows on the tingling national cheek, mixed with remorseful self-accusations at the weak petting, which had so encouraged unrestrained tempers as to invite to this public breaking of the family crockery and this unconcealable family disgrace. “Had not the rod been so long spared,”—was the general feeling,—“we should now be spared the use of the ramrod.” The next morning, however, Mr. Lincoln proclaimed the need of seventy-five thousand ramrods, with good men to accompany them to Washington. At the same time he asked the wise men to meet at the capital in July for consultation. Ere the next daybreak, a thousand Massachusetts lads were on their way towards the Potomac, shining in new-burnished steel and new polished love for that old Union mother, whose goodness had been so steady and uniform as hitherto to excite no manifested return. On the 19th of April they reached Baltimore, and were passing through in the horse-cars, when they were set upon by a bad lot of hards and softs of that city,—as others before and since have frequently been assailed in their transit, by railway and hotel runners. Other regiments soon followed from “the teeming North, through all her unfrozen loins.” Guns were got down from rusted hooks; shoulder-straps straightened; blunderbusses and other busses given and taken; officers beaten up from behind ploughshares to be beaten in first skirmishes into good leaders; and shields from all the free States were clasped around the waist of the capital. Never were there so many gun-holders, nor so few office-seekers, at Washington in the month of April. The soft velveted hand which caressed was now stiffened into the steel gauntlet to smite. Meanwhile the English government, employed since 1783 in looking across at us through the large end of its telescope, suddenly got its eye at the other extreme, and discovered the monstrous size of this country, the large population, and unmanifested pluck of the nine somehow seceded States, and, to her, the very obvious absence of any ties or mutual necessity between two such admirably designed single nations. This was the almost unanimous opinion, too, of the well-dressed classes; although some Bright Englishmen, and especially the hard toilers in the manufacturing districts,—although working in smoke,—saw more clearly the object and design as well as the final end of the commencing difficulty than those whose near-sightedness spread a film over all their American observations. “The Hunited States ’ave too many people,” said Lord John. “Haltogether, yes,” replied Lord Palmerston.