f McClellan have been of the worst kind--Breckinridgians. But perhaps
he will throw them off. He is young, and the elevation of his
position, his standing before the civilized world, will inspire and
purify him, I hope. Nay, I ardently wish he may go to the camp, to the
camp.

McClellan published a slave-catching order. Oh that he may discard
those bad men around him!

Struggles with evils, above all with domestic, internal evils, absorb
a great part of every nation's life. Such struggles constitute its
development, are the landmarks of its progress and decline.

The like struggles deserve more the attention of the observer, the
philosopher, than all kinds of external wars. And, besides, most of
such external wars result from the internal condition of a nation. At
any rate, their success or unsuccess almost wholly depends upon its
capacity to overcome internal evils. A nation even under a despotic
rule may overcome and repel an invasion, as long as the struggle
against the internal evils has not broken the harmony between the
ruler and the nation. Here the internal evil has torn a part of the
constitutional structure; may only the necessary harmony between this
high-minded people and the representative of the transient
constitutional formula not be destroyed. The people move onward, the
formula vacillates, and seems to fear to make any bold step.

If the cause of the freemen of the North succumbs, then humanity is
humiliated. This high-spirited exclamation belongs to Tassara, the
Minister from Spain. Not the diplomat, but the nobly inspired _man_
uttered it.

But for the authoritative influence of General Scott, and the absence
of any foresight and energy on the part of the administration, the
rebels would be almost wholly without military leaders, without naval
officers. The Johnsons, Magruders, Tatnalls, Buchanans, ought to have
been arrested for treason the moment they announced their intention to
resign.

Mr. Seward has many excellent personal qualities, besides his
unquestionable eminent capacity for business and argument; but why is
he neutralizing so much good in him by the passion to be all in all,
to meddle with everything, to play the knowing one in military
affairs, he being in all such matters as innocent as a lamb? It is not
a field on which Seward's hazarded generalizations can be of any
earthly use; but they must confuse all.

Seward is free from that coarse, semi-barbarous know-nothingism which