e conservative, and all this out of deepest hatred
towards all that is noble, humane, and lofty in the genuine American
people. Well they may! If by his generalship McClellan butchered
hundreds of thousands in the field, he was always very conservative
of his precious little self.

Biting snow storm all over Virginia! Our soldiers! our soldiers in
the camp! It is heart-rending to think of them. Conservative
McClellan so conservatively campaigned until last November as to
preserve--the rebel armies, and make a terrible winter campaign an
inevitable necessity. O, Copperheads and Boston conservatives! When
you bend your knees before McClellan, you dip them in the best and
purest blood of the people!

_February 3._--The Secretary of War appointed General Casey to
shorten the general tactics for the use of Africo-American regiments
to use them as light infantry.

The devotion of American women to the sick and wounded soldiers,
makes them be envied by the angels in Heaven (provided there are
any). This devotion of these genuine gentlewomen atones for the
ignoble flippancy of dancing crinolines.

Down, down goes slavery notwithstanding the _gates of hell_, and
their guard, the McClellans, the Sewards, amorously embracing the
Copperheads and all that is dark and criminal. Humanity is avenged
and Eternal Justice is satisfied.

_February 4._--Sumner is re-elected to the Senate. His re-election
vindicates a sound principle, because his opponents were all the
Copperheads and slavery-saviours in Massachusetts. Sumner's
influence in the Senate is rather limited. Politically he is on all
points most honest; but his conduct towards Seward is not calculated
to impress one with any very high esteem for his manhood.

It is not force, or decision, or power, that is cruel in
revolutionary times--but, weakness. All societies have had their
epochs of progress and of retrogression. Sylla was a conservative,
and so too was Phocion. The Pharisees were reactionists and
conservatives. Europe has millions of them, of various hues, shapes,
tendencies and convictions. But the reactionists and conservatives
in the past of Europe all have been and are of a purer metal than
the conservatives here, and their impure organs, as the National
Intelligencer, the World, the Boston Courier, and the rest of that
fetish creed.

_February 4._--The French Yellow Book, or State Correspondence,
justifies my forebodings of November last. Mr. Mercier's diplom