The attitude of the Confederate Government was necessarily defensive. History would be searched in vain for examples justifying an invasion by a people entirely agricultural in habits and resources, weak in numbers, and with a government not yet organized three months, of a powerful manufacturing and commercial nation, of dense population, and great wealth and resources. Without supplies, equipment and transportation, and without the time or opportunity to obtain them, successful invasion of the North, however attractive to the popular imagination, was clearly impossible. Viewed from the more educated stand-point, furnished by the later developments of the war, the crude ideas, from which arose the popular aspiration of at once "carrying the war into Africa," are ludicrous in the extreme. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the defensive, subjected to such modifications as the casualties of war render proper and necessary in all plans, whether offensive or defensive, was at all times the true policy of the South. Certain it is, that, upon two occasions, essaying the offensive under the most favorable circumstances, and under their greatest commander, the Confederates were overtaken by disaster. There can be no just criterion, furnished by European wars, by which to test the Confederate military policy in the main. Parallels between the American civil war and those waged by Frederick the Great and Napoleon are inadmissable. Not only were circumstances entirely dissimilar, but able military critics have indicated physical peculiarities, forbidding the unexceptional application to American warfare, of maxims which, elsewhere, are undisputed.