l, the sacrifice of the people is as pure as was that made
by Abel; that made by the people's captains, leaders, pilots is
Cain-like.

_February 27._--All the Copperheads fused together have done less
mischief, have less distorted and less thrown out of the track the
holy cause, they have exercised a less fatal and sacrilegious
influence, they are responsible for less blood and lives, than is
Mr. Seward, with all his arguments and spread-eagleism. Even
McClellan and McClellanism recede before Seward and Sewardism, the
latter having generated the former. In times of political
convulsions, perverse minds and intellects at the helm, more fatally
influence the fate of a nation than do lost battles. Lost battles
often harden the temper of a people; a perverse mind vitiates it.

_February 27._--Gold rises, and no panic, a phenomenon upsetting the
old theories of political economy. This rise will not affect the
public credit, will not even ruin the poor. I am sure it will be so,
and political economy, as every thing else in this country, will
receive new and more true solutions for its old, absolute problems.
The genuine credit, the prosperity of this country, is wholly
independent of this or that financial or governmental would-be
capacity; is independent of European exchanges, and of the
appreciation by the Rothschilds, the Barings, and whatever be the
names of the European appraisers. The American credit is based on
the consciousness of the people, and on the faith in its own
vitality, in its inexhaustible intellectual and material resources.
The people credits to itself, it asks not the foreigners to open
for it any credit. The foreign capitalists will come and beg. The
nation is not composed here as it is composed all over Europe, of a
large body of oppressed, who are cheated, taxed by the upper-strata
and by a Government. Thus credit and discredit in America have other
causes and foundations, their fluctuations differ from all that
decides such eventualities in Europe.

I am sure that subsequent events will justify these my assertions.

_February 28._--Inveterate West Pointers got hold of the dizzy
brains of some Senators and of other Congressmen, and Congress
wasted its precious time in regulating the military position of
engineers. This action of Congress is a _pendant_ to the Academy of
Sciences. The leaders in this discussion proved to _nausea_; 1st.
Their utter ignorance of the whole military science, of its
s