ities.

The press in Europe, above all, on the Continent, is different. Its
editors and contributors risk their liberty, their persons, their
pockets, and sacrifice all to their convictions. They are not afraid
to speak out their convictions, even if under the penalty to
lose--subscribers; and that is all the risk run by an American
newspaper. The _Herald_, the _World_, the _Express_, all organs of
the evil spirit, through thick and thin, stand to their fetish, that
McClellan; the Republican papers neither pitilessly attack the
enemies, nor boldly and manfully support the friends, of the cause.

I nurse no personal likings or dislikings; the times are too mighty,
too earnest for such pettiness. For me, men are agencies of
principles: bad agencies of an intrinsically good principle are
often more mischievous than are bad principles and their confessors.
The eternal tendency of human elevation and purification is to
eliminate, to dissolve, to uproot social evils, to neutralize or
push aside bad men, in whatever skin they may go about. It is a slow
and difficult, but nevertheless incessant work of our race. It is
consecrated by all founders of religions, by legislators, by
philosophers, by moralists; it is an article of human, social and
political ethics. As far as I experienced, the European radical
press more strictly observes that rule of political ethics than the
American press is wont to do. And the press, bad or good, is the
high pontifex of our times; more than any other social agency
whatever, the press ought, at least, to be manly, elevated,
indomitable, vigilant and straight-forward. I mean the respectable
press.

_March 3._--Senator Wilson's kind of farewell speech to the
Copperheads was ringing with fiery and elevated patriotism. It
re-echoed the sentiments, the notions, the aspirations of the
people. The cobbler of Natick rose above the rhetors, above the
deliverers of prosy, classical, polished, elaborated orations, above
young and above gray-haired Athenians, high as our fiery and stormy
epoch towers over the epochs of quiet, self-satisfied, smooth, cold,
elaborate and soulless civilities.

_March 4._--Mr. Lincoln hesitates--and, as many assert, is
altogether opposed to use all the severity of the laws against the
rebels. And shall not our butchered soldiers be avenged? It is
sacrilegious to put in the same scales the Union soldier and the
rebels; it is the same as to put on equal terms before justice