We have said that Jefferson Davis must ever appear to the eye of mankind the historic representative of the Confederate cause. The North can not, assuredly, reject this decision, since it made him the vicarious sufferer for what it affected to consider the sins of a nation. Through him, it actually accomplished that from which the great abilities of Edmund Burke recoiled in confession of impotent endeavor, the indictment of an entire people. Those Southern men who have rashly and ungenerously assailed him as responsible for the failure of the South to win its independence, can not complain if the verdict of history shall be that the genius of its leader was worthy of a noble cause, whose fate the laws of nature, not the resources or the impotence of one man, determined. The star of Napoleon went down upon the disastrous field of Waterloo, and the millions that he had liberated passed again under the domination of tyrants whom they despised. But would the most stupid Bourbon partisan, therefore, call in question the mighty genius of Napoleon? It is a glorious memory to France, that her illustrious sovereign, aided by the valor of her children, defied for twenty years, the arms of combined Europe, but she has no blush that those energies were not equal to an indefinite resistance. That the South, struggling against mortal odds, with her comparatively feeble resources constantly diminishing with each prodigious effort, finally succumbed to an enemy inexhaustible in strength and reinforced by the world, is no testimony against either the valor or the skill with which her struggle was directed. Like Washington, Davis was embarrassed, in a hazardous cause, with defection, distrust, and discontent. But, unlike Washington, Davis did not receive the assistance of a powerful ally at the moment when aid could be most serviceably employed.