November 18.—In the street a soldier offered to sell me the pay already several months overdue to him. As I could not help him, as gladly I would have done, being poor, he sold it to a curb-stone broker, a street note-shaver. I need not say that the poor soldier sustained a loss of twenty-five per cent. by the operation! He wanted to send the money home to his poor wife and children; yet one fourth of it was thus given into the hands of a stay-at-home speculator. Alas, for me! I could not save the poor fellow from the remorseless shaver, but I could and did join him in a very energetic cursing of Chase, that at once pompous and passive patriot.
This induced me to enter upon a further and more particular investigation, and I found that hundreds of similar cases were of almost daily occurrence; and that this cheating of the soldiers out of their nobly and patriotically earned pay, may quite fairly be denounced as rather the rule than as the exception. The army is unpaid! Unspeakable infamy! Before,—long before the intellectually poor occupant of the White House, long before any civil employé, big or little, the Army ought to be paid. Common humanity, common sense, and sound policy affirm this; and common decency, to say nothing about chivalric feelings, adds that when paymasters are sent to the army at all, their first payments should be made to the rank and file; the generals and their subordinate officers to be paid, not before, but afterwards. Oh! for the Congress, for the Congress to meet once again! My hope is in the Congress, to resist, and sternly put an end to, such heaven-defying and man-torturing injustice as now braves the curses of outraged men, and the anger of God. How this pompous Chase disappoints every one, even those who at first were inclined to be even weakly credulous and hopeful of his official career. And why is Stanton silent? He ought to roar. As for Lincoln—he, ah! * * * * The curses of all the books of all the prophets be upon the culprits who have thus compelled our gallant and patriotic soldiery to mingle their tears with their own blood and the blood of the enemy!
Nov. 18.—Again Seward assures Lord Lyons that the national troubles will soon be over, and that the general affairs of the country "stand where he wanted them." Seward's crew circulate in the most positive terms, that the country will be pacified by the State Department! England, moved by the State papers and official notes—England, officially and non-officially, will stop the iron-clads, built and launched in English ports and harbors for the use of the rebels, and for the annoyance and injury of the United States. England, these Americans say, England, no doubt, has said some hard words, and has been guilty of some detestably treacherous actions; but all will probably be settled by the benign influence of Mr. Seward's despatches, which, as everyone knows, are perfectly irresistible. How the wily Palmerston must chuckle in Downing Street.
The difference between Seward and a real statesman, is this: that a statesman is always, and very wisely, chary about committing himself in writing, and only does it when compelled by absolutely irresistible circumstances, or by temptations brilliant enough to overrule all other considerations; for, such a statesman never for one moment forgets or disregards the old adage which saith that "Verba volant, scripta manent." But Seward, on the contrary, literally revels in a flood of ink, and fancies that the more he writes, the greater statesman he becomes.
At the beginning of this month, I wrote to the French minister, M. Mercier, a friendly and respectful note, warning him against meddling with politicians and busybodies. I told him that, before he could even suspect it, such men would bring his name before the public in a way neither pleasant nor profitable to him. M. Mercier took it in good part, and cordially thanked me for my advice.
Nov. 19.—Burnside means well, and has a good heart; but something more is required to make a capable captain, more especially in such times as those in which we are living. It is said that his staff is well organized; God be praised for that, if it really is so. In that case, Burnside will be the first among the loudly-lauded and self-conceited West-Point men, forcibly to impress both the military and the civilian mind in America, with a wholesome consciousness of the paramount importance to an army of a thoroughly competent and trustworthy staff.
The division of the army into three grand corps is good; it is at once wise and well-timed, following the example set by Napoleon, when he invaded Russia in 1812. If his subordinate generals will but do well, I have entire confidence in Hooker. He is the man for the time and for the place. As a fighting man, Sumner is fully and unquestionably reliable; but I have my doubts about Franklin. He is cold, calculating, and ambitious, and he has the especially bad quality of being addicted to the alternate blowing of hot and cold. Burnside did a good thing in confiding to General Siegel a separate command.
The New York Times begins to mend its bad ways; but how long will it continue in the better path?
Nov. 20.—England stirs up and backs up rebellion and disunion here; but, in Europe, for the sake of the unity of barbarism, Islamism, and Turkey, England throttles, and manacles, and lays prostrate beneath the feet of the Osmanli, the Greeks, the Sclavi, the heroic Montenegrins. England is the very incarnation of a treachery and a perfidy previously unexampled in the history of the world. The Punica fides, so fiercely denounced and so bitterly satirized by the historians and poets of old Rome, was truthful if compared to the Fides Anglica of our own day.
Nov. 22.—Our army seems to be massed so as to be able to wedge itself in between Jackson in the valley and Lee at Gordonsville. By a bold manœuvre, each of them could be separately attacked, and, I firmly believe, destroyed. But, unfortunately, boldness and manœuvre, that highest gift, that supreme inspiration of the consummate captain, have no abiding place in the bemuddled brains of the West-Pointers, who are a dead weight and drag-chain upon the victimised and humiliated Army of the Potomac.