tify the claim.

Up to this day Secesh is the positive pole; the Union is the
negative,--it is the blow recipient. When, oh, when will come the
opposite? When will we deal blows? Not under McClellan, I suspect.

NOVEMBER, 1861.

Ball's Bluff -- Whitewashing -- "Victoria! Old Scott gone
overboard!" -- His fatal influence -- His conceit -- Cameron --
Intervention -- More reviews -- Weed, Everett, Hughes -- Gov.
Andrew -- Boutwell -- Mason and Slidell caught -- Lincoln
frightened by the South Carolina success -- Waits unnoticed in
McClellan's library -- Gen. Thomas -- Traitors and pedants -- The
Virginia campaign -- West Point -- McClellan's speciality -- When
will they begin to see through him?

The season is excellent for military operations, such as any Napoleon
could wish it. And we, lying not on our oars or arms, but in our beds,
as our _spes patriae_ is warmly and cosily established in a large
house, receiving there the incense and salutations of all flunkeys.
Even cabinet ministers crowd McClellan's antechambers!

The massacre at Ball's Bluff is the work either of treason, or of
stupidity, or of cowardice, or most probably of all three united.

No European government and no European nation would thus coolly bear
it. Any commander culpable of such stupidity would be forever
disgraced, and dismissed from the army. Here the administration, the
Cabinet, and all the Scotts, the McClellans, the Thomases, etc.,
strain their brains and muscles to whitewash themselves or the
culprit--to represent this massacre as something very innocent.

Victoria! Victoria! Old Scott, Old Mischief, gone overboard! So
vanished one of the two evil genii keeping guard over Mr. Lincoln's
brains. But it will not be so easy to redress the evil done by Scott.
He nailed the country's cause to such a turnpike that any of his
successors will perhaps be unable to undo what Old Mischief has done.
Scott might have had certain, even eminent, military capacity; but,
all things considered, he had it only on a small scale. Scott never
had in his hand large numbers, and hundreds of European generals of
divisions would do the same that Scott did, even in Mexico. Any one in
Europe, who in some way or other participated in the events of the
last forty years, has had occasion to see or participate in one single
day in more and better fighting, to hear more firing, and smell more
powder, than has General Sco