To voluntarily offer to literally ease the fall of the enemy, as Mr. Lincoln has done, is a stretch of magnanimity which would be incomprehensible to any Old World rulers. How long would a Napoleon or a Wellington, unembarrassed by aught save the direst military conduct of a war, have hesitated to free the blacks, and win victory by every or any means? Mr. Lincoln has had more difficult and complicated elements to deal with. He has the enemy not only in the field, but by myriads at home, among those who pretend to urge on the war. He has them 'spying and lying' every where—promoting cabals in favor of a General, and exciting opposition, in order to eventually crush him—urging Southern rights and amnesties—deluding and confounding every thing. No wonder, after all, that the London Times, comprehending nothing, should have been so wildly asinine as to see in the Message only a bid to conciliate the South!—a timid, making-up measure. The Times is behind our times, and no wonder, when a Russell flounders about for it among us, becoming more densely befogged and confused with every new idea which entangles itself with his pre-conceived English opinions.
The country is rejoiced to hear that General Wool has ordered Russell away from Fortress Monroe. When the latter quits the country, it will be as though it had heard some very good news for our nation's benefit.
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We were not at first disposed to believe in the many revolting stories so generally circulated, stating that the rebels had actually, in many instances, boiled the bodies of the Federal dead, for the purpose of obtaining the bones as relics. So frequently, however, has the story been repeated, and from so many trustworthy quarters, that we are reluctantly compelled to admit that such paragraphs as the following, from the Southern correspondence of the Boston Journal and Transcript, are very possibly founded in fact:
'Washington, 1st.
'The certainty that the graves of the members of the Chelsea and Boston Fusilier companies who fell in the advance on Bull Run, last July, have all been despoiled, with a probability that their bones were sent South, as relics, causes a deep feeling of indignation here.
'A citizen of Cambridge, Mass., who went to Bull Run to recover the remains of his brother, who belonged to a Boston company, gives a sad account of the sacrilege committed upon the graves of our soldiers by the rebels. About twenty of a Boston company and a Chelsea company had been buried near each other, but every skull had been taken away, and nearly all the principal bones of the bodies were gone. Some of the bodies had been dug out, and others pried out of the graves with levers, and in some the sleeves of uniforms were split to obtain the bones of the arms. It was described as a sickening spectacle.'
When we recall the savage, half-Indian nature of many of the lower Southern troops, and the threats of scalping and mutilating, in which they so often indulged; and when we remember that even in Richmond, the body of John Brown's son is still exposed, as the label on it intimates, not as a scientific preparation, but as a warning to Abolitionists; we see nothing extraordinary in such tales. If professors, men of science, and 'gentlemen' can wreak vengeance on the harmless bodies of the dead, and place a placard, expressing the hope that it may be thus with those who simply differ with them in political opinions, it is not to be wondered at that their rude and ignorant confrères should dig up dead bodies, and send the bones home as relics. It is just possible, however, that we do not appreciate the true motives of these Ghouls. When Scanderbeg died, his enemies fought among themselves to obtain the smallest fragment of his bones, believing that their possession would confer on the lucky wearer some of the courage of the great hero himself. And so it may be that these craven savages hope to get a little real Northern pluck and stubborn endurance.
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We cheerfully find place for the following, dated from 'Willard's, Washington, D.C., April 2d:'