Page:The parallel between the English and American civil wars.djvu/35

CIVIL WARS who presume to dictate to generals, presidents, and cabinets." While Lincoln thought that the issue of the struggle would show whether popular government was an absurdity or not, Sherman thought that the struggle itself was proving it an absurdity. "The Northern people," he said, "have to unlearn all their experience of the past thirty years, and to be born again, before they will see the truth ."

In the end, after much suffering and many mistakes, "the Northern people" learnt the conditions of military efficiency and military success old lessons which the English had learnt at the same cost in the seventeenth century, and may have to learn again in the twentieth.

It is worth while to compare men as well as events, after the manner of Plutarch. At the close of our war Cromwell was in a position very much like that of Grant: a successful general whose victories marked him out for the headship of the State. But it is not with Grant that I shall compare 27