all this bewildering turmoil and impure
factiousness, are nevertheless, stubbornly determined to persevere
and to succeed in saving their country.

_Dec. 7._--The European wiseacres, the would-be statesmen, whether
in or out of power, especially in England, and that opprobrium of
our century, the English and the Franco-Bonapartist press, have
decided to do all that their clever brains can scheme towards
preventing this noble American people from working out its mighty
and beneficent destinies, and from elaborating and making more
glorious than ever its own already very glorious history. As well
might the brainless and heartless conspirators against human
progress and human liberty endeavor to arrest the rotation of a
planet by the stroke of a pickaxe.

Ah! Mr. _Decembriseur_, with your base crew of lickspittles, your
pigmy, though treacherous efforts, even contending with those of the
English enemies of light, and of right, your common hatred of
Freedom and Freemen will end in being the destruction of yourself.

_Dec. 7._--Burnside complains of the manner in which he is
victimised, and explains his inactivity by the fact that the War
Department neglected to furnish him with the necessary pontoons.
How, in fact, was Burnside to move a great army without pontoons?
But it was the duty of Halleck, and his lazy or incompetent, or
traitorous staff, to have seen to the sending on of the pontoons.
However, supposing Burnside and _his_ staff to have as much wit as
an average twelve-year-old school boy, they could have found in the
army not merely hundreds, but even thousands of proficient workmen
in a variety of mechanical trades, who would have constructed on the
spot, and at the shortest notice, any number of bridges, pontoons,
&c. Oh, how little are those wiseacre generals, the conceited and
swaggering West Pointers; oh, how very little, if at all are they
aware of the inexhaustible ingenuity and resources, the marvelous
skill and power of such intelligent masses as those of which they
are the unintelligent, the unsympathising and the thoroughly
unblessed leaders!

On a Sunday, exactly four weeks back from the day which I wrote
these lines, McClellan was dismissed, and was succeeded by Burnside.
But, after the established McClellan fashion, the great, great army
was marched 30 to 50 miles, and then halts for weeks up to its knees
in mud, and occupies itself in throwing up earthworks. And this is
called making War! and t