It is true that by 'throwing grass' at the enemy, as President Lincoln quaintly terms it, by the anaconda game, and above all, by constantly yelling, 'No nigger!' and 'Down with the Abolitionists!' we have contrived to lose some forty thousand good soldiers' lives by disease; to stand where we were, and to have myriads of men paralyzed and kept back from war just at the instant when their zeal was most needed. We beg our readers to seriously reflect on this last fact. There are numbers of essential and bold steps in this war, and against the enemy, which _must_, in the ordinary course of events, be taken, as for instance. General Hunter's policy of employing negroes, as General Jackson did. With such a step, _honestly_ considered, no earthly politics whatever has any thing to do. Yet every one of these sheer necessities of war which a Napoleon would have grasped at the _first_, have been promptly opposed as radical, traitorous, and infernal, by those tories who are only waiting for the South to come in again to rush and lick its hands as of old. Every measure, from the first arming of troops down to the employment of blacks, has been fought by these 'reactionaries' savagely, step by step--we might add, in parenthesis, that it has been amusing to see how they 'ate dirt,' took back their words and praised these very measures, one by one, as soon as they saw them taken up by the Administration. The _ecco la fica_ of Italian history was a small humiliation to that which the 'democratic' press presented when it glorified Lincoln's 'remuneration message,' and gilded the pill by declaring it (Heaven knows how!) a splendid triumph over Abolition--that same remuneration doctrine which, when urged in the New-York _Tribune_, and in these pages, had been reviled as fearfully 'abolition!' However, all these conservative attacks in succession on every measure which any one could see would become necessities from a merely military point of view, have had their inevitable result: they have got into the West, and have aided Secession, as in many cases they were intended to do. The plain, blunt man, seeing what _must_ be adopted if the war is to be carried on in earnest, and yet hearing that these inevitable expediencies were all 'abolition,' became confused and disheartened. So that it is as true as Gospel, that in the West, where 'Abolition' has kept one man back from the Union, 'Conservatism' has kept ten. And the proof may be found that while in the West, as in the East, the better educated, more intelligent, and more energetic minds, have at once comprehended the necessities of the war, and dared the whole, 'call it Abolition or not,' the blinder and more illiterate, who were afraid of being 'called' Abolitionists, have kept back, or remained by Secession altogether.