The ratio in warfare of the spiritual to the material is as three is to one

The South was on the defensive, for the North was outstripping it in wealth, power, and control of the central government.

But because of its aristocratic tendency, the South had supplied a disproportionate number of the officers in the central army, and most of the war-material was in the South at the start of the War. The antifinancial heroic attitude of the South gave it an immense advantage in the field against the Yankee armies, who were inoculated with a war propaganda of jealousy of the superior life in the South. The War was a contest — not the last in Western history — between quality and quantity. The North had all the war-industries, most of the railroads, and four times the population available for military purposes.

The material weakness of the South was too great to be compensated for by its spiritual superiority on the field of battle, where its heroic spirit gained victory after victory over superior numbers. The South could not replace its human losses however, and this the Yankees could do, utilizing German and Irish immigrants in particular. This War was the largest-scale war in the Western Civilization up to the First World War. The armies numbered millions, the theater of war embraced more than a million quadrate kilometers. Railroads and ironclads entered tactics for the first time.

Napoleon had calculated, from his experience on 150 fields, that the ratio in warfare of the spiritual to the material is as three is to one. Assuming this to be true, the defeat of the South was the result of Yankee material superiority of more than three times. This war had many lessons for Europe, but was mostly ignored in the European capitals, which were still in the nationalistic petty-state period, and not capable of large-space thinking. It showed the enormous military potentiality in America, it showed the Yankee character, which was thenceforth to be the American spirit, it showed the enormous will-to-power of the New York plutocracy — it showed, in short, that a base for a world-power had been laid here.

Francis Parker Yockey
Imperium