Ashtabula Weekly Telegraph

The Bases of Peace.
BY HORACE GREELEY.

The general expectation strongly points to an early peace. One or two decisive battles—perhaps one in the East and another in the West—will, it is generally thought, break the back of the Rebellion. Not that the physical ability of the Confederate leaders to bring men into the field has yet been destroyed, but that their power to sustain armies is nearly exhausted. For modern war differs widely from ancient in its requirement of money, or what is equivalent, for its persistent prosecution. No Vandal horde, no Gothic irruption, could sweep across Europe, because the necessary consumption of costly explosives and projectiles would soon leave it incapable of further advance and at the mercy of a less numerous and daring but more effective enemy—more effective because amply supplied with the perishable enginery of war.

When the bayoneted musket and heavy cannon supplanted the ruder and cheaper missiles of antiquity, the day of Alaries and Attilas, of Scythians and Huns, was over. All the barbarians now on earth, though they should count their combatants by millions, would be unequal to the task of over-running the France or Great Britain of the XIXth Century. In fact, their excessive numbers would but insure their speedier destruction, by famine and by reason of terrible advantages which the invention of Gunpowder and the latest developments of the belligerent capacities of Iron have secured to civilized world in all future collisions with barbarous nations.

The Rebellion has still two great armies with minor divisions of its forces confronting Gens. Burnside, Hunter, Butler, and trampling out the remaining life of East Tennessee, perhaps equal to one more such —in other words, fully Three Hundred Thousand effective soldiers in arms to-day

But it has lost all hold upon Kentucky, Missouri. and Maryland : it has lost at least half of Virginia and Tennessee respectively : and it has received a staggering blow in the destruction of its fleet and the capture of its forts on the Lower Mississippi —, resulting in the surrender of its chief commercial emporium. New Orleans. to the Federal arms—a loss which virtually isolates Texas. and renders its unexhausted stores of corn and cattle of little further use to the Confederate cause : and it has lost prestige if not actual strength by the successive withdrawals of its forces from Manassas, from Yorktown, and from Williamsburg, followed by the triumphant columns of McClellan. Its soldiers are generally in rags, while the means of reclothing them are not within its reach : its arms are deficient and inferior, and it is not likely to be able to replace them. Worst of all, its promises to pay are nearly as uncurrent as they are intrinsically worthless, while its supply of food is clearly inadequate to its urgent needs.

An army, composed in good part of impressed Europeans or Northerners by birth, cannot retreat under such auspices without being profoundly demoralized : and it is nearly certain that one-third of the Three Hundred Thousand still ranged under the standards of Jefferson Davis would gladly leave them tomorrow if they safely could.

Such armies, with such resources, cannot sustain a protracted contest against such well appointed legions as our generals are now leading to battle. A few days, not impossibly, may see the total collapse of what remains of the Confederacy. with the flight or disappearance of its chiefs ; a few weeks at the furthest, should witness the old flag floating in triumph over Richmond, Knoxville, Raleigh, Charleston, Mobile, and Jackson, and the Rebellion apparently suppressed.

But when its armies shall have been dispersed, it spirit is likely to remain. The demoniac hate which treacherously assailed and slaughtered the unarmed volunteers of Massachusetts in the streets of Baltimore, which has bayoneted our wounded on many a battle-field, and which dug up our dead heroes from the graves of Manassas to tear out their skulls for drinking cups and soap-dishes, and their jaw bones for spurs, still glares from the eyes and is uttered through the hisses of Rebel women in Nashville, New Orleans, and every slave-holding city occupied by our troops. The men who remain scowl silently; but the women finding that impunity in their dress which their deportment does not justify. everywhere parade their implacable hostility to the National cause and all who sustain it. The life of a Union soldier who straggles from or falls behind his comrades in any rebel region is not worth a day's purchase. if three or four rebels, no matter how peaceful their garb and usual occupation, can pounce upon him undetected; the rebel riots in New Orleans, whereby the national flag was torn down and trampled under foot after the City had confessed itself at the mercy of our arms ; the burning of merchant vessels, of cotton, of all manner of private property which is supposed desirable to the loyal States, all show that the Rebellion lives in the hearts of the slaveholding caste and its satellites, and refuses to be exorcised by any amount of kindness and expostulation. The very forbearance generally evinced by our soldiers inflame the malignity of the rebels : they feel that these evince a higher civilization than their own, and they are obliged to represent and try to regard them as proofs of our conscious weakness and apprehension, and thus to inflame their own courage by treating our triumphs as fortuitous and soon to be effaced by defeats. Assassination, poison, yellow fever, such are the agencies which they invoke for destruction of the Union armies, and by whose aid they hope to retrieve their recent disasters.

For they know if we do not, that it is Slavery which has grappled in deadly struggle with the Union, and that one of the two must perish. Varnish over the matter as we may, they feel that "the peculiar institution" bombarded Fort Sumter. seized the Norfolk and Pensacola Navy Yards, with the various armories, arsenals, mints, and sub-treasuries wrested by force from the Union, and turned over as spoils to the Confederacy ; that it was Slavery that triumphed at Manassas, and now reels under its discomfitures at Pea Ridge, Fort Donelson, and New Orleans. And, just so long as Slavery lives and reigns in the hearts of the ruling caste in any State, so long will that State be agitated by secret conspiracies if not convulsed by open war to divide and destroy the American Republic, unless that end should meantime be attained, and the Union irrevocably disrupted

This fact the self-styled Conservatives of the loyal States will not comprehend; hence their disquisitions on "the Union as it was" are utterly wide of the mark. A restoration of the hollow accord between Liberty and Slavery which existed, or seemed to exist, 30 years since, may be ever so desirable, but it is clearly impossible.

The Right of Secession—that is the right of the dominant party in any state to break up the Nation at pleasure—is henceforth a canon of the Slave Power, and will never be practically repudiated, though it may be formally disavowed. Make a compromise tomorrow whereby slavery shall be reinstated in the power it formerly possessed, its Masons and Slidells replaced in the Senate, its Floyds and Davises in the Cabinet. and its sub-servient Buchanans and Pierces in the White House, and it will fly afresh to arms on the first indication that the scepter is passing from its own to an unlineal hand.

It will regard the right to do so as consecrated by the struggles and sacrifices, the privations and sufferings, of the present rebellion, and will resort to its exercise whenever pretext and opportunity shall conspire to tempt the perilous issue If the mortification of defeat in the present struggle be keen, it will be easier, the sooner, provoked to invoke again the stern arbitrament of arms, in order to efface the stigma from its own and the world's memory ; and it will begin forthwith to secure alliances, domestic or foreign, and to store up the means of rendering its next struggle successful through avoidance of the errors of and a supply of what was wanting in the former.

The Nation must now make its choice be-tween a Union founded on identity of principles and convictions, therefore substantial and enduring. and a Union based on reciprocal hypocrisies—in simulation here matched by dissimulation there—a Union impelled by hopes of profit alone, and which must perish whenever those hopes are even transiently disappointed. A Union based on impartial Liberty, mutual Truth, universal Justice, is now possible ; and that Union will abide securely forever.