cience may be among such
signs of recognition.

_February 26._--O, could I only win confidence in Mr. Lincoln, it
would be one of the most cheerful days and events in my life.
Perhaps, elephant-like, Mr. Lincoln slowly, cautiously but surely
feels his way across a bridge leading over a precipice. Perhaps so;
only his slowness is marked with blood and disasters. But the most
discouraging and distressing is his _cortege_, his official and
unofficial friends. Mars Stanton, Neptune Welles, are good and
reliable, but have no decided preponderance. Astrea-Themis-Bates is
mostly right when disinfected from border-State's policy, and from
fear of direct, unconditional emancipation. But neither in Olympus
nor in Tartarus, neither in heaven nor in hell, can I find names of
prototypes for the official and unofficial body-guard which,
commanded by Seward, surrounds and watches Mr. Lincoln, so that no
ray of light, no breath of spirit and energy may reach him.

_February 26._--This civil war with its _cortege_ of losses and
disasters, which after all fall most bloodily and crushingly on the
laborious, and rather comparatively, poorer part of the whole
people; perhaps all this will form the education of the rank and
file of the political Democratic party. The like Democratic masses
are intellectually by far inferior to the Republican masses.
Experience will perhaps teach those unwashed Democrats how degrading
was their submission to slavocracy, which reduced them to the
condition of political helots. This rank and file may find out how
they were blindfolded by slave breeders and their northern abettors.
A part of the Democratic masses were, and still are kept in as
brutal political ignorance and depravity as are the poor whites in
the South, under whatever name one may record them. Now, or never,
is the time for the _unwashed_ to find out that during their
alliance with the Southern traitors, all genuine manhood, all that
ennobles, elevates the man and warms his heart, was poisoned or
violently torn from them--that brutality is not liberty, and
finally, that the Northern leaders have been or are more abject than
abjectness itself. If the rank and file finds out all this, the
blood and disasters are, in part at least, atoned for.

_February 27._--O! could I from every word, from every page of this
Diary, for eternities, make coruscate the nobleness, the simple
faith with which the people sacrifices all to the cause. To be
biblica