The Sun.
London, England, 1866-11-14 00:00:00

to the gathering cohorts of treason the aegis of its
discipline and its name."
On Baltimore being threatened by Lee in his in-
vasion of Maryland, the 7th hurried up to the de-
fence of the city. When the terrible riots broke out
in New York the 7th were pushed into the metropolis
in the nick of time to overawe and quell a disturb-
ance which might have grown into a formidable in-
surrection. Thus the regiment was always held in
readiness for any great emergency, at the same time
that from its ranks were drafted the men destined to
fill the decimated ranks of the officers, and to furnish
commanders for constant levies of fresh troops raised
in the Northern States. After paying a high tri-
bute of praise to the services performed by this regi-
ment, which the General was so well qualified to
do, the corps having served under his personal com-
mand, he proceeded to remark on the lessons taught
by the war. " First of these is the great truth that
the course of military successes is always from
north to south, from frosts and snow to flowers
and sunshine. Our very instincts teach us
that it must be so, and all history confirms it.
It is not because the Southern nature is less spirited
or less capable of high and heroic achievements, but
because the Northern muscle, elaborated under a
colder sky and through more invigorating influences
of climate, acquires more compactness, tenacity, and
strength, carrying with it (for the mental and
physical conditions always assimilate) a greater
moral power of endurance. Southern races
are, for the most part, precipitate, impas-
sioned, fiery, vehement, sometimes breaking
down all opposition by force of their resistless
impetuosity. Northern races, on the other hand,
are calm, deliberate, persistent, determined, and as
immovable as a rock against which wind and storm
are idly expending their fury. The remark may
seem fanciful, and yet I believe it to be historically
true, that great military successes, considered in
reference to parallels of latitude, are subject to a
law analogous to those which govern currents of
running water. They do not rise above the level
of their source, or if carried to a greater height by
ome special force they subside to their former level
as soon as that force is withdrawn. Accordingly
we find that the great tides of conquest in all ages
have flowed from north to south, or east to west, or
nearly the same parallels of latitude. It required
the extraordinary genius.of Julius Ccesar, the most
finished commander, perhaps, that ever lived, to
carry the victorious arms of Rome, when the great
republic was in the fullness of its prosperity and
power a few degrees of latitude north of the metro-
politan centre. And yet we all remember that it
was more than a hundred years after his first inva-
sion of the little island/ of Great Britain before it
was reduced to the condition of a Roman province.
Even then only the lower part was subdued, and the
Emperor Adrian was compelled to build a wall
across it to protect the Roman soldiery from the in-
cursions of the Caledonians, the predecessors of the
Scotchmen of our day. Now I venture to say, that
if that island had been fifteen or twenty degrees
further South it would not have resisted the'Roman
power successfully through a single campaign. The
operations of Hannibal in Italy may seem to conflict
with my theory, but not if they are properly con-
sidered. It is true he marched up through Spain,
crossed the Alps, descended into Italy, and obtained
several signal victories over the Romans. But his
operations did not contain one of the elements of
permanent conquest. They were nothing but a pro-
tracted raid; and after a few years he was compelled
to return to Carthage to defend that city against
the very people whom he was invading. There was
a remarkable instance eight or nine centuries later of
the truth of the proposition I have stated. Some six
hundred years after the Christian era—when man-
kind, as if in defiance of the celestial messages of
the Great Teacher, had sunk into a moral torpor as
dangerous to all the interests of civilisation as the
living paganism which had preceded it—God raised
up an avenger in Mahomet to destroy all that de-
served to perish, and to rouse to action all that was
worthy of being preserved. The creed of the
Prophet was full of error, but it contained one
vital truth, and under its influence his followers
were roused to a wild enthusiasm which nothing
could resist. It was in the name of the
one and the ever-living God that their, scimitars
flashed to the light ! The great tide of Islamism
poured down through Western Asia into Africa,
across Egypt and the Desert of Barca, whelming
the ancient Pentapolis, over the narrow strait which
separates Africa from Europe, sweeping across the
sunny plains of Andalusia and over the vine-clad
hills of Grenada, until the great wave burst at the
base of the mountains of Asturias. It did not rise
in the West above the level of its sources in the
East. And thus this great human deluge, impelled
by the spirit of conquest and religidus frenzy, bear-
ing on its crest the trophies of Eastern science and
art, was poured out over Western Europe, and
planted there some of the richest 'germs of civilisa-
tion, to be purified and perfected in after" ages by
the clearer light of Christianity. Wherever armies
have gone to the north for the purpose of 'conquest
they have been defeated. The Greeks and Romans
were constantly repulsed by the rude nations north
of them. The legions of Yarns were cut to pieces in
the wilds of Germania by Arminius and his fol-
lowers. Nay, the great modern conqueror of
Europe, when he undertook—if I may so express
myself—a campaign against the Arctic circle, with
one of the most numerous and best-disciplined armies
the world ever saw embodied, was discomfited—not
so much, it is true, by the arms as by the strategy
of his enemies, and by the rigours of the climate.
His immense host, like that of Xerxes, was broken
to pieces, and he was compelled to retreat, leaving
thousands of his followers sleeping in bloodless
death upon the frozen plains of Muscovy. On the
other hand, when great conquering armies have
been sent to the south they have nearly always been
victorious. The Romans overrun everything south
of them, down to the shores of the great African
desert—one of those seas of sand which are far more
impracticable than any waste of waters. The Ro-
mans, in their turn, were overrun by the barbarous
nations north of them. The Goths, the Normans,
the multinomial races which were swarming century
after century out of the great northern line, over-
whelmed all Europe down to the very shores of the
Mediterranean ; and even Southern Italy saw these
rude warriors, with frames compacted almost to the
hardness of iron by hyperborean frosts, unbuckling
their armour, and lying down in the summer radi-
ance on the heights of Sorrento, by the blue waters
of Bai, and even in the classic grotto of Panstlipo.
In like manner armed multitudes from Central and
Western Europe poured down into Syria, under the
unconquerable banner of the Cross, and wrested the
Holy Sepulchre from the hands of its infidel pos-
sessors. The flaming scimitar of the fiery Saladin,
as described in 'Walter Scott's " Crusaders," falling
in fast but ineffectual blows on the massive battle-
axe of the cool Plantagent, is but a type of
what the world has seen, and will con-
tinue to the end of time to see, in the
conflicts of southern with northern races.
I wish some of our Canadian friends were here to
take comfort from these suggestions. When the
rebel raiders, whom they were harbouring, crossed
our frontier to plunder our villages, shoot down our
unarmed people and give this city to the flames,
through a schemeof incendiarism which for atrocity
has no parallel in the annals of barbarism ; and
when a certain Department commander, whose
name I will not mention, with a fr ontier of nearly
a thousand miles to guard, with only sixty military
posts along its whole extent, and without two hun-
dred men in any one of them, gave orders to the
commanders of these slender garrisons, in case the
depredations were repeated, to pursue and capture
the marauders, even if it were necessary to cross the
astronomical line which constitutes the boundary
between the two countries—the stout hearts of our
northern neighbours need not to have been disturbed
by any imaginary apprehension of invasion. No,
gentlemen ; whenever the tide of emigration, the
only instrument of conquest the United States em-
ploy when unprovoked, shall rise again in the East,
it will move on across our own territory to Ne-
braska, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Cali-
fornia, Oregon, and the calmer shores of the Pacific.
Or, if it should deviate from our own parallels of
latitude, it will not be in the direction of Hudson's
Bay and the coast of Labrador, where the bosom of