den the friend of the Union, can no more stand Mr.
Seward's confused logomachy, and in a speech sneers at Mr. Seward's
dispatches. The New York _Times_ _dutifully_ perverts Cobden's
speech; other papers _dutifully_ keep silent.

_May 10._--To extenuate Hooker's misconduct, his supporters assert
that he was struck, stunned, and his brains affected. Hooker was
stunned on Friday, and his campaign was already lost on Tuesday
before, when he wrote his silly proclamation, when he subsided with
the army in a _semi-lunar_ (the worst form of all) camp, and
challenged Lee to come and fight him. Lee did it. Hooker was
intellectually stunned on Tuesday. Further: the results of the
material stunning on Friday could never have been so fatal if the
army had been organized on the basis of common sense, as are all the
armies of intelligent governments in Europe. The chief-of-staff
elaborates with the commander the plan of the action; he is
therefore familiar with the intentions of the commander. When the
commander is disabled, the chief-of-staff continues the action. At
the storming of Warsaw, in 1831, Prince Paschkewitsch, the
commander, was disabled or stunned, and his chief-of-staff, Count
Toll, directed the storm for two days, and Warsaw fell into Russian
hands.

No more effective is the defence of the defeat, by throwing the
fault on the Eleventh Army Corps. The Eleventh Corps was put so much
in advance of a very foggishly--if not worse--laid out camp, that
it was temptingly exposed to any attack of the enemy. The Eleventh
Corps was separated from the rest of the army, as was Casey's
division in the Chickahominy. The laying of a camp, the distribution
of the corps, in a well organized army, is the work of the staff and
of its chief; but Butterfield was not even then in Chancellorsville.
Lee, who if caught napping, quickly awoke, wheeled his army as if it
were a child's toy, cut his way through woods which amazed Hooker,
and arrived before Hooker's semi-lunar camp. We, all the time, as it
seems, were ignorant of Lee's movements. A good staff, and what Lee
did, we would have accomplished. Lee quietly found out our
vulnerable point; and struck the blow. That, if you please, _was_ a
stunner. Finally: the Eleventh Corps was eleven or twelve thousand
strong. The weakest in the army, equal to a strong division in a
European army of one hundred thousand men. The breaking of a
division or of twelve thousand men posted at the extreme flan