The Richmond Whig of December 20 had a most minute
cal- culation of the resources of the South in white men, and showed to its own satisfaction on paper that the South has still 692,795 fighting white men, and that its army in the field should consist of 461,864 white men at least. It is pleasant to know on paper to a man exactly what number the President ought to have, and the Richmond editor must have felt great satisfaction in numbering up the last four of that large number. Unfortunately, however, his inference is bad, for after getting at the number of males of the right age in his own way, he deducts only 10 per cent. for "dis- ability and other causes," which must be vastly under the mark. The most gigantic effort ever made in Europe was made by France under the Convention, when she put about one twenty-fifth of her population under arms. This calculation makes the number avail- able about one-sixth of the Confederate people. But we are not left to conjecture. Governor Brown, of Georgia, in a letter dated December 9, states that Georgia has been absolutely stripped of troops by the war,—that nearly fifty regiments of Georgian troops have spent years under arms in Virginia, and that "much the largest part" of the militia recently put under arms to harass General Sherman's march consisted of "boys between 16 and 17 and old men between fifty and fifty-five years." Governor Brown requested that the Georgian regiments at least might be returned to defend the State in its peril, on the ground that it had no other resource. And, perhaps excepting North Carolina, Georgia is the most populous State remaining to the Confederacy. We fear, then, that the paper figures of the Richmond editor were only figures of speech, not figures of fact.
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