The almost daily occurrences here long ago would have exasperated the hot-headed and warm-hearted nations in Europe, and treason would have become their watchword. O American people! thou art warm-hearted, but of unparallelled endurance!
No European nation, not even the Turks, would patiently bear such a condition of affairs. Every where the sovereign would have been forced to change, or to modify, the personnel of his ministers and advisers; and Mr. Lincoln is in the hands of Messrs. Seward and Blair, both worse even than McClellan, and—cannot shake them off.
Now, for the first time in my life, I realize why, during the last stages of the dissolution of the Roman empire, honest men escaped into monasteries, or why, at certain epochs of the great French revolution, the best men went to the army.
Ah! to witness here the meanest egotism, imbecility, and intrigue, coolly, one by one, destroy the honor and the future of this noble people. Curse upon my old age! above all, curse upon my obesity! Curse upon my poverty! What a cesspool! what a mire! Only legal slaughterers all around! O, could I go to a camp! but, of course, not to one under McClellan. Sigel's camp. Sigel's men are not soulless; they fight for an idea, without an eye to the White House.
The rhetors, the stump-speakers, the politicians, and the intriguers hold the power, and—humanity and history shudder at the results.
Oct. 29.—McClellan, with his wonted intrepidity and rapidity, crossed the Potomac from all directions, pushes on Winchester, and—will find there wherefrom every animal willingly discharges itself.
A foreign diplomat, one of the most eminent in the whole corps, said yesterday, "No living being so ardently prays for rain as does McClellan; rain will prevent fighting, marching, &c." Such is the estimation of our hero.
Fevers decimated many regiments at Harper's Ferry. If McClellan would have marched only five miles a day, fighting even such battles without any generalship, as he did at Antietam, the army would be healthier, and by this time would be in Richmond.
The decision of the court of inquiry between a patriot and the incarnation of West Point McClellanism, between Martindale and that Fitz-John Porter, ought to open the eyes of any one, but—not those of Mr. Lincoln.
Only two days ago Mr. Lincoln declared, that the reason why McClellan and his pets are not removed is, not any confidence in McClellan's capacity, but to preserve the political balance between the republican and the democratic parties.