Page:The parallel between the English and American civil wars.djvu/23

CIVIL WARS War permanently secured the ends they were fought for, Cromwell's victories were less fruitful.

Let us now turn from the political to the military aspects of the two struggles. There is one obvious difference. The English Civil War was in the main a contest between two parties, the American a contest between two parts of one country. For that reason Mr Goldwin Smith declared that the term "civil war" was hardly appropriate in the case of America, "since this was not a struggle between two parties for the same land, like that between the League and the Huguenots in France, or the Cavaliers and Roundheads in England, but between two communities territorially separate for the land of one of them which the other had taken arms to annex. Only in the border States, in which each of the two parties was struggling for ascendancy, could it be strictly called a civil war ."

This is rather hypercritical. A war 15