ole line
from Fredericksburg to the Shenandoah. If the rebels attack Pope he
must retreat and concentrate before Washington; and then again begins
the uphill work. The people generally pour in blood, time and money;
but brains, brains are needed, and, without violating the formulas,
the people cannot inaugurate brains. Whatever the people may do, the
same quacks and bunglers will over again commit the same blunders.
Nothing can teach a little foresight to the helmsman and to some of
his seconds. Rocked by his imagination, Mr. Seward never sees clearly
the events before him and what they generate.

The call for three hundred thousand men will be responded to. The men
will come; but will statesmanship and generalship come with them? I am
afraid that the rebels, operating with promptness and energy, may give
no time to the levies to be fully organized; the rebels will press on
Washington.

McClellan reports to the President that he has only 50,000 men left.
The President goes to James river, and finds 83,000 ready for action.
Was it ignorance in McClellan, or his inborn disrespect of truth, or
disrespect of the country, or something worse, that made him make such
a report? And all this passes, and Mr. Lincoln cannot hurt McClellan,
although a gory shroud extends over the whole country.

A secretary of the French consul is here, and confirms my speculations
concerning the numbers of the rebels in the last battles on the
Chickahominy. The current and authoritative opinion in Richmond is,
that from the Potomac to the Rio Grande the rebel force never exceeded
300,000 men. If so, the more glory; and it must be so, according to
the rational analysis of statistics.

Mr. Seward writes a skilful dispatch to explain the battles on the
Chickahominy. But no skill can succeed to bamboozle the cold,
clear-sighted European statesmen.

No doubt Mr. Seward sincerely wished to save the Union in his own way
and according to his peculiar conception, and, after having
accomplished it, disappear from the political arena, surrounded by the
halo of national gratitude.

But even for this aim of reconstruction of the Union as it was, Mr.
Seward, at the start, took the wrong track, and took it because he is
ignorant of history and of the logic in human affairs. To save the
Union as it was, it was imperatively necessary to strike quick and
crushing blows, and to do this in May, June, etc., 1861. Mr. Seward
could have realized then what now is