Right here is one of the main reasons why the South, in the late war, was overwhelmed with defeat in four years. The commissarial department of army supplies lacked energy, integrity, perseverance. The armies, by consequence, suffered terribly the last year and a half of the war from desertion. Scores of thousands of men took leave of absence during that time--we will not stigmatize them deserters--went home and managed to keep out of the way of the ubiquitous conscript officer, or, by collusion with him, secured freedom from molestation by him. With naked feet and backs, and empty stomachs, they preferred to leave the field of active operations and let fat officers "fight it out on that line." Thus the impetus with which the South inaugurated the war, though tremendous in maddened enthusiasm at first, soon became exhausted, and the grand on-rush was left by the suicidal policy, or want of policy, without resources, and in four years died out and succumbed to the superior powers of the North.
The general drift of past history goes to show that North men have generally been victors in all wars with South men where the mutual conditions of the contending parties otherwise were anything like equal. The northern climes are sturdy and masculine, while the southern are enervating and effeminate. The people of these respective latitudes, as it were by an inevitable law of assimilation in nature, are conformed to them in physical and mental condition.
Without raising a question of the possible or impossible, but simply of the probable or improbable, as touching the adaptability of white labor to the South--for the white man _can_ do anything possible to be done by human agency at all, and if challenged _will_ do it for the sake of experiment, or pride, or some pet theory, if nothing more--and by white man we mean the Anglo-Saxon, headship of all the human species in physical symmetry and intellectual force--it will be sufficient to say that, "judging the future by the past," which is a safe general rule, making all due allowance for exceptional cases, it is not to be expected the Anglo-Saxon race will ever perform the common field labor of the Southern States of this country, the Gulf States in particular. An appeal to their history in past ages, and other countries, will show they never have done it in such extreme latitudes. The reasons appear to be those of constitution and Providence, and are inseparably dual in form and action. The constitutional make-up of the Anglo-Saxon is such, so fine and sensitive, and so elastic withal, as displayed in his more native northern climes that he will probably ever obey, in the main, the isothermal conditions of nature and climate, which affect and influence his activity, _pro_ and _con._, and in and to which he was born. The temperate zone is unquestionably his center of gravity, and toward this his specific race will continue in the future, as in the past, to gravitate.