Military merit, or rather, since
that is not so readily estimated, military notoriety, will be the measure
of all claims to civil distinction.--One bullet-headed general will
succeed another in the Presidential chair; and veterans will hold the
offices at home and abroad, and sit in Congress and the state
legislatures, and fill all the avenues of public life. And yet I do not
speak of this deprecatingly, since, very likely, it may substitute
something more real and genuine, instead of the many shams on which men
have heretofore founded their claims to public regard; but it behooves
civilians to consider their wretched prospects in the future, and assume
the military button before it is too late.
We were not in time to see Washington as a camp. On the very day of our
arrival sixty thousand men had crossed the Potomac on their march towards
Manassas; and almost with their first step into the Virginia mud, the
phantasmagory of a countless host and impregnable ramparts, before which
they had so long remained quiescent, dissolved quite away. It was as if
General McClellan had thrust his sword into a gigantic enemy, and,
beholding him suddenly collapse, had discovered to himself and the world
that he had merely punctured an enormously swollen bladder.
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