pposed to all of Mr. Clark's
ideas.

I must here remark that the financial depression in the North at this
time was terrible. I knew many instances in which landlords begged it as
a favour from tenants that they would remain rent-free in their houses. A
friend of mine, Mr. Fales, one day took me over two houses in Fifth
Avenue, of which he had been offered his choice for $15,000 each. Six
months after the house sold for $150,000. Factories and shops were
everywhere closing, and there was a general feeling that far deeper and
more terrible disasters were coming--war in its worst forms--national
disintegration--utter ruin. This spirit of despair was now debilitating
everybody. The Copperheads or Democrats, who were within a fraction as
numerous as the Republicans, continually hissed, "You see to what your
nigger worship has brought the country. This is all your doing. And the
worst is to come." Then there was soon developed a class known as
Croakers, who increased to the end of the war. These were good enough
Union people, but without any hope of any happy issue in anything, and
who were quite sure that everything was for the worst in this our most
unfortunate of all wretched countries. Now it is a law of humanity that
in all great crises, or whenever energy and manliness is needed,
pessimism is a benumbing poison, and the strongest optimism the very
_elixir vitae_ itself. And by a marvellously strange inspiration (though
it was founded on cool, far-sighted calculation), I, at this most
critical and depressing time, rose to extremest hope and confidence,
rejoicing that the great crisis had at length come, and feeling to my
very depths of conviction that, as we were sublimely in the right, we
must conquer, and that the dread portal once passed we should find
ourselves in the fairy palace of prosperity and freedom. But that I was
absolutely for a time alone amid all men round me in this intense hope
and confidence, may be read as clearly as can be in what I and others
published in those days, for all of this was recorded in type.

Bayard Taylor had been down to the front, and remarked carelessly to me
one day that when he found that there was already a discount of 40 per
cent. on Confederate notes, he was sure that the South would yield in the
end. This made me think very deeply. There was no reason, if we could
keep the Copperheads subdued, why we should not hold our own on our own
territory. _Secondly_, a