A little more historical and political knowledge diffused among her people might have saved the South the unnecessarily bitter lesson she has received on this matter. Very, very few of the unthinking young men and women who clamored so madly for war four years ago, knew what fiend they were invoking. Few, very few of their leaders knew. Could the curtain that vailed the future have been lifted but for a moment before them, how would they have recoiled horror-stricken! But while admitting that in cases of very bitter national hatreds, ill-disciplined soldiery, and raw generals, excesses are allowed and defended, it is also the province of history to point with pride to those instances where veteran commanders, knowing well the horrors of war, seek to alleviate its miseries, and "seize the opportunities of nobleness," and, believing with Napier, that "discipline has its root in patriotism," do effectually control the armies they lead. Of such as these there are happily not a few great names whose humanity and generosity exhibited to the unfortunate inhabitants of the country they were traversing lend additional lustre to their fame as consummate soldiers. I shall, however, recall but one example to confirm this position--an example likely to be particularly interesting to Southerners as a parallel, and most striking as a contrast, to General Sherman's course in the South. In the month of January, 1781, exactly eighty-four years before General Sherman's artillery trains woke the echoes through the heart of the Carolinas, it pleased God to direct the course of another invading army along much the same track; an army that had come three thousand miles to put down what was in truth "a rebellion;" an army stanch in enthusiastic loyalty to the government for whose rights it was contending; an army also in pursuit of retreating "rebels," and panting to put the finishing blow to a hateful secession, and whose commander endeavored to arrive at his ends by strategical operations very much resembling those which in this later day were crowned with success. Here the parallel ends. The country traversed then and now by invading armies was, eighty-four years ago, poor and wild and thinly settled. Instead of a single grand, deliberate, and triumphant march through a highly cultivated and undefended country, there had been many of the undulations of war in the fortunes of that army--now pursuing, now retreating--and finally, in the last hot chase of the flying (and yet triumphant) rebels from the southern to the northern border of North-Carolina, that invading army, to add celerity to its movements, voluntarily and deliberately destroyed all its baggage and stores, the noble and accomplished Commander-in-Chief himself setting the example. The inhabitants of the country, thinly scattered and unincumbered with wealth, exhibited the most determined hostility to the invaders, so that if ever an invading army had good reason and excuse for ravaging