Is this, then, to be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel about Cotton?  Shall there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism?  Are we to have no Cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold?—­no Cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell?  To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours.  Not only is it national life and a foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God’s own hand.  If democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this cardinal truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great for its defence and establishment, then democracy will have vindicated itself beyond all chance of future cavil.  Here, we think, is a Cause the experience of whose vicissitudes and the grandeur of whose triumph will be able to give us heroes and statesmen.  The Slave-Power must be humbled, must be punished,—­so humbled and so punished as to be a warning forever; but Slavery is an evil transient in its cause and its consequences, compared with those which would result from unsettling the faith of a nation in its own manhood, and setting a whole generation of men hopelessly adrift in the formless void of anarchy.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

The Armies of Europe:  Comprising Descriptions in Detail of the Military Systems of England, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sardinia, adapting their Advantages to all Arms of the United States Service; and embodying the Report of Observations in Europe during the Crimean War, as Military Commissioner from the United Stales Government in 1855-56.  By GEORGE B. McCLELLAN, Major-General U.S.  Army.  Originally published under the Direction of the War Department, by Order of Congress.  Illustrated with a Fine Steel Portrait and Several Hundred Engravings.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott & Co. 8vo.

It is an interesting study to examine into the causes or motives which have produced military books of the higher order; for we are thus vouchsafed an insight into the writer’s genius, and an intelligence of the circumstances amidst which he wrote, and of which he was often an important controller.  The Archduke Charles wrote his “Grundsaetze der Strategie,” etc., as a vindication of his splendid movements in 1796, against the French armies of the Rhine and the Sambre-et-Meuse; and it has remained at once a monument to his achievements and a standard text-book in military science.  Marmont, the Marshal Duke of Ragusa, collecting the principles of the art of war from “long and frequent conversations