Editor's Cable.
war, and

THE PEOPLE AND THE GOVERNMENT.- owe little of their texture to sheep or goat, and

fore coming to the mess-table.

Nor can we forget the strange exposure of human life in more than one signal instance, and that too within reach of the very chiefs of the army and the Cabinet. To err is human, we all know, but to err where the most precious lives are at stake, and to go on in the same easy, inefficient way after the best blood of the people has been recklessly shed, is not to be set down among the common and venial errors of men in high places. We are not, indeed, fond of sentiment in public documents, nor do we expect much pathos in messages of state or bulletins of war, but a little more seriousness and tenderness in treating the terrible losses and sufferings in battle might help instead of harming the sterner documents and measures that should prevent such calamities in time to come.

We have borne patiently and hopefully the mistakes and disasters of the war; and now, after the failure of our principal army to do its work, and finding ourselves, contrary to all expectation, at the beginning instead of the end of the Virginia campaign, we are not as a people out of temper, and the

orable thing of the whole war. Yet there is a deepening seriousness throughout the nation, and a solemn expectation that the day of action is at hand. This feeling must needs deepen as the burdens of the contest press, as they are now beginning to press, upon the whole nation. Most men have lost money by the war, and the derangements of business have been general and severe; but this loss is more calmly borne because inevitable, and as such it is easily charged to the noble struggle for the national life. But the war-tax and the war-draft can not but call searching attention to the Government, and make the people scrutinize closely the judgment and ener

this autumn, which is likely to bring with it signal events, can not but urge upon us most significant thoughts. We are now in the third stage of our national crisis. Fort Sumter taught us that we are a people, and mean to stand by our national life; Bull Run convinced us that we must have an army, and gave us the most magnificent army on earth; the Army of the Potomac has shown us that we must have a government equal to the issue, and it is upon this imperative want that both the people and the army are now dwelling with intense emphasis. Why more efficiency in the Government is demanded, what are the chief causes of its recent inefficiency, and what is called for by the voice of the nation and is sure to have the nation's favor and support, our readers may not need many words of ours to suggest. It is evident that the Government now stands before the bar of public opinion as never before. Never before in our national experience have such enormous trusts been committed to an Administration as within the last two years; and of course, as the reasonable time for the faithful and judicious disposition of those trusts comes round, there is a loud and general call for a full account of the great steward-present tender of men and money is the most memship. In one respect this call is a somewhat trying one, from the obvious fact that it pronounces the very magnificence of the war-supplies, which in themselves were regarded as triumphs of the Government's power, to be the measure of its responsibility, and the test of its competence. Millions, hundreds of millions of money were voted, and more than half a million of men rushed into the field at the public call. "What a marvelous Government that can work such wonders!" we at once cried; and we insisted upon having all the earth, and especially astonished Europe, bow down in admiration at the achievement. But now comes the searching question, What have you done, O rulers, with all this magnificent equip-gy of our rulers to decide how far we suffer of necesment? and how were you indebted for it to the generosity with which the people gave you money, and which may have tempted you to mistake the ease with which provisions, clothing, arms, ammunition, horses, and ships can be bought, and troops can be paid, for sagacity and force in using these supplies? It is easy to spend money and buy all sorts of things with it, and a thousand millions of dollars in any country on earth will make a wonderful display, whether in peace or war. Our Government has spent a thousand millions of dollars, and has had a great deal to show for it, yet not what it ought to have shown; and there probably has never been, since the world was, in the same time, so much waste of material or more needless exposure of life than in our country. Not only have contractors been allowed to cheat us by the sale of worthless articles at full prices, but the supplies, good and bad, that have been furnished, have been most lavishly used, and often most recklessly wasted; provisions and clothing that would be thought in other armies good enough for careful use, being, in some cases, thrown upon the ground and left to decay, as unfit for the palate or the limbs of our soldiers. In other instances, our troops have been left half naked and half starved; and it would take some time to reckon the number of contractors whose cloth and blankets

sity. Comparatively, the nation at large has not
felt the war, except in the feeling of public spirit
and patriotic fellowship. The money came easily,
because no person has been obliged to put his hand
into his pocket, and the nation has run into debt for
its supplies. Now taxation is to begin, and we
might cherish serious misgivings as to its effect
upon the public pulse were we not sure that the
croakers, who begrudge their dollars to the tax-
gatherer, will be vastly outnumbered by the pa-
triots who insist that their money shall be well
used, and who call the Government to solemn ac-
count for the trust so generously, yet so laboriously,
and often painfully, bestowed. But we are now
touched in sensibilities more tender than our purse-
strings, and are called to hold our lives at the call
of our country. We acquiesce in the drafting, and
the public pulse beats more cheerfully at the procla-
mation that makes every able-bodied man liable to
be called to the battle-field. Yet we can not but in-
sist upon having an equivalent for this sacrifice, and
the nature of the offering required of us comes home
now to every family, as it could not do when only
they who chose joined the army.
We expect
much complaining, and there must needs be many
cases of fearful hardship when men are torn from
their families to go to the war; but we do not an-

ticipate any break in the great purpose of our people to be a nation. The cry will be more earnest for decision and victory, and the Government will be held to its duty as never before, now that it is intrusted not only with the money, but with the life-blood of the whole nation.

We have not been captious during the fearful trials of the last year and a half, and in this respect the result has been quite different from the perhaps reasonable anticipation. It was supposed that the Government would be in advance of the people, and that a stubborn individualism would make us refuse to submit to public orders, and a democratic selfconceit would tempt us to carp at every public measure that demanded the least obedience or sacrifice. Quite the contrary: the people have been in advance of the Government, and have shown their loyalty not only in providing the most ample means, but by patience under reverses. Instead of making the worst, we have tried to make the best of the sad blunders of leaders, and we have reason to marvel at our own good-nature. Yet there must needs be a limit to this forbearance, and the good sense that leads us to make allowance for the inexperience in officials with some fellow-feeling for it, from our own conscious rawness, will speak in a different tone when the time of ignorance, to be reasonably winked at, is passed, and daylight, with its call for wise and effective action, has come.

The Government can not, of course, do every thing; and there are limits to its ability, not only from the limits of the human faculties, but the peculiar nature of our republic. It is well to think of this when we find ourselves yielding to the very ready desire for a scape-goat on whom to lay the burden of our infirmities, and determined to make over the curse to some unfortunate member of the Cabinet. It is well to remember, too, that our rulers may have a hard time as well as we, and may need rather to be comforted and strengthened in their duties than to be doubted and perplexed. What the charms of office may be we are not able from any experience to say, and we will not deny that a certain fascination belongs to all places of power; and man, as such, likes to hold the reins, even if it be to ride over walls and ditches, or through armed legions, or even through hungry office-seekers or carping journalists. Yet it would be hard to see any attraction in the highest national offices now to reputable men, apart from the sense of duty that insists upon standing by the welfare of the country, and from the sentiment of fellowship that is sustained by public respect. Certainly we can not envy the position of our rulers now; and the thought that they bear hardships for us that they would gladly escape by private life may abate our censure without abating our patriotism. Let every persistent grumbler ask how he would like it if every high official in the Cabinet and the army would take him at his word, and resign at once in diffidence or despair, and his tongue might have more oil upon its hinges and more honey in its note.

once. In the war, too, they have not only the advantage of fighting on their own soil, with full knowledge of the ground, and in all the passion of a people who have been persuaded that they are defending their homes against invasion, but they have a single point to look to the defeat of the invader; whereas we fight at arm's-length, in a distant region, and with the desire not so much to defeat as to conciliate the enemy-not to set up a new empire, but to keep an old and well-established order. We suffer thus from the distance of the field and the division of our intentions as well as of our forces; and, in fact, from the very security and strength of our own position. We must remember, moreover, that the rebel leaders were chosen for their fighting qualities, while ours were not so chosen; and the very last thing that the patriotic and sagacious Illinois lawyer who now lives in the White House expected, when he first caught from the telegraph wires the news that he was to be President, was that he would be commander-in-chief of a million of soldiers, and that his steps to the capital would be dogged by assassins.

We must consider, perhaps chief of all, the remarkable fact that, inferior as the people in rebellion are to the loyal States in character and in culture, they have more carefully studied the arts of power, and more sedulously fostered and schooled the gifts of leadership than we. Their dispositions and their policy have both tended that way; and while our people lead our politicians, their politicians lead the people. We have not met with any thoughts that better illustrate the governing qualities relatively displayed, North and South, than in that admirable book on representative government by John Stuart Mill, which every true American ought to read, and then bind in gold for the study of his children. Mill affirms that the merit of political institutions is twofold, and consists partly of the degree in which they promote the general mental advancement of the community-including in that phrase advancement in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency-and partly of the degree of perfection with which they organize the moral, intellectual, and active worth already existing, so as to operate with the greatest effect on public affairs. Government thus is at once a great influence acting on the human mind and a set of organized arrangements for public business, and according as it looks chiefly to the one or the other of these ends it may expect to see fruits, either in the general culture of the people or in the centralized power of the political organism. Now it is very evident that we have looked rather at the first than to the second object, and generally been so taken up with our schemes of individual prosperity and education as to leave very little, comparatively, for the Government. We have asked to have business prosper and education thrive, and have not thought the care of the nation of sufficient consequence or in sufficient danger to engage our most earnest thought or to occupy our first men. Moreover our loyal people are in the main so well to do, We are ready to allow that the feeling is not an so much on a par with each other, and so independinfrequent one that the rebel leaders have shown ent as to require very little governing, and to give more ability, considering their relative means, in little emphasis to the central authority either in the attempting to destroy the Union than our rightful State or Nation. It is quite otherwise with the rulers have generally displayed in saving it. But rebels. They have a lower grade of population to what else, under the circumstances, could be expect-keep in order than we know any thing of, and their ed when we consider the issue and the parties? The institution of Slavery compels them to band together rebel leaders had a desperate game to play, and fail-in self-defense, and gives them the sense of dominure was and must be to them utter ruin, while suc-ion and the thirst for power. Inequalities among cess would be, in their opinion, wealth and glory at their white population, moreover, give to office a

prestige and feeling of caste that do not here attaching each State free to manage its domestic affairs. to it, while the business interests of the great slave- Even our present Territorial policy is to be regarded owners are such as to band them and their depend- rather as intended to protect our own settlers than to ents together in mutual and persistent fellowship, domineer over our neighbors or take from their actuand thus raise up a class of politicians who have the al or imagined rights. We have little faith in the name of statesmen to the country, and the functions final prevalence of any schemes that aim to overof attorneys to the local interests of the South. throw the whole law and custom of the nation, and Thus the spirit of business combines with the con- trample upon local liberty by centralized authority. struction of society to put the most effective men at The central authority must stand not by destroying, the South into politics, and keep them there in but by substantiating local liberty; and the reason a way to secure a power and continuity of office un- why our people are so patient in submitting to presknown at the North. Here one respectable man ent restraints upon personal and sectional freedom is is looked upon as about as good as another, and because they regard such restraints as the temporary office changes readily from hand to hand, and confers evils that must be borne to secure final peace and little social distinction, being held in little honor by secure independence-just as a wounded man subfirst-class men in business and the professions. mits to having his arm a while in a sling and in splints that he may recover the full use of his limb the sooner. In this way, too, we legitimate an aggressive method of dealing with the rebels that is wholly against our habitual temper and policy, and are ready to sustain the Government in any measures, however stringent, that are essential on grounds of true policy to restore our Union in its local independence and central authority. How much we prize our independence the rebels have found to their cost, in their recent abortive attempt to invade our loyal States; and they will find it even more as soon as the Government enable our people to see clearly the connection between our own permanent liberty and the utter defeat of secessionism, by a well-arranged and persistently prosecuted system of measures offensive and defensive.

Corresponding with this difference in the public policy of the two sections, the individualism of the loyal States and the centralizing measures of the rebel States, is the difference between the types of character fostered. We are more strongly marked by unwillingness to have power exercised over us; while they are more marked by the desire to exercise power over others. They answer well to Mill's statement, that "there are nations in whom the passion for governing others is so much stronger than the desire for personal independence, that for the mere shadow of the one they are found ready to sacrifice the whole of the other." Surely the rebel leaders have made immense sacrifices of personal liberty for the sake of keeping and extending their power over others; and would probably submit to any amount of privation or restraint that might enable them to indulge their domineering passion, and give their Southern empire a haughty place among the nations. We are not surprised that men of wealth and ambition are willing to accept even subordinate places in the rebel army, and stoop thusnot in humility, but in pride-and obey that they

may conquer.

We are asking not to be cajoled, petted, indulged by our rulers, but to have the truth plainly spoken and the issue distinctly put. The Government have not begun to appreciate the earnestness and honesty of the people, and seem to resort to concealment and artifice when openness and confidence would be far more politic as well as conciliating. The recent call for troops would have met a far speedier response if it had come directly from the President, with a full explanation and a patriotic appeal, instead of being made in such a roundabout way as the suggestion of the State governors. The enlistment lagged in great part because the heart of the nation was not touched; and when our pulses began again to beat with the true glow, it was rather from the natural recovery from their former depression, the rise of their own tide from its extreme ebb, than from any especial help or motive from the National Government. The people were wrongly deceived as to the condition and prospects of the Army of the Potomac, and afterward they were as wrongly mistrusted in the mode of presenting to them the new necessities created by the disasters of the Peninsula. They are intelligent and patriotic enough to bear entire frankness, and to meet every responsibility at the hands of their rightful rulers.

Our Free States have little of this love of dominion, which is so mightily fostered by the presence of a dependent and comparatively passive race. We wish to be let alone, and to let others alone. Yet our independence does not make us allow ourselves to be meddled with, but, on the contrary, makes us sensitive to all interference with our rights; and the moment we believe our rights to be interfered with, the very sentiment of independence takes us at once out of our cool individualism and bands us together in self-defense. Hence the wonderful rising when our flag was assailed at Fort Sumter. The seceders might have carried to almost any length their passive rebellion, and no matter what they might do or say, we would have let them alone so long as they let us and our national property alone. We were very quiet and good-natured, and were supposed to be timid, and willing to submit to any indignity rather than risk our ease and our money. Never was a greater mistake made; and from the The Government-the executive, we mean-has day when our flag was fired on by rebels to this now the destiny of the nation in its own hands. hour, our loyal people have not wavered an instant Money, men, measures of enforcing military power in determination to stand by the country. Our in- by civil penalties-all are ready, and no prattling, dependence is proved to be our strength; and pre-meddlesome Congressmen are now in session to break cisely because we do not wish to interfere with others, we do not mean to have our rights interfered with. Our union is in order to keep our liberty, while the rebels unite to lord it over others.

Our Government should see and appreciate this trait of our population. It must be evident to them that we have no disposition, as a whole, to break the old constitutional usage and national habit of leavVOL. XXV.-No. 150.-3 II

the unity and the silence of executive force. We look to the President and his Cabinet, and can not deny that they are now on trial before the whole country and the world. They must be wise, strong, and effective, or fearful evils will soon come upon them and the whole land.

They must be wise especially in that crowning act of wisdom that sees the main thing to be done.

We know very well what will be said of the Border States and their unwillingness to have the work of amelioration begin. Their scruples will increase in the ratio of our timidity, and diminish with the rise of our determination. Let them see that we mean to put the rebellion down, and they must not stand shaking in their shoes but must go with us or against us, and they will not be slow in making their election. Let the national purpose to put down the rebellion be accompanied with as strong a purpose to give the loyal States their Constitutional rights, and guarantee to them the control of their own institutions, with the offer of compensation for slaves of loyal masters when emancipated by law, and we have no great fear as to the issue. There are difficulties in every direction, but no such difficulties in the path pointed out as in our present murderous and ruinous war, or in a base surrender of the rule of the nation to the very power that has brought upon us our disasters.

Who can fail to see it? The main thing is victory | els, including slaves, should be confiscated. Now -victory in the main point of the contest-victory let the confiscation follow the advance of our armies, where the armies of our constitutional Republic meet and a new aspect will be put upon the war. The the gathered hordes of the rebel conspiracy. We strongest policy will thus be inaugurated, and the have had words enough already, and they have true principle will be established. The war will ceased to tell with much power on the loyal or the have a moral character as well as a material and porebellious. Even the President's proclamation of litical importance, and the sad error avoided that emancipation to the slaves of rebel States must de- balances territory and wealth with life, and regards pend for its efficacy not upon the strength of its lan- the acquisition of land, instead of triumph of right, guage, but upon the strength of the arm that goes as sufficient return for rivers of bloodshed. with it. The words are but breath, if the same vacillating policy that has so generally characterized the war on our side shall interpret this extraordinary document, and make the voice under this lion's skin roar as gently as a sucking dove. As to the proclamation itself, as holding the American doctrine of State rights, we measure its worth and can justify its issue only as a war measure. So far as the rebels themselves are individually concerned, they can not expect to have any of their property protected while they are assailing the property and lives of the whole loyal nation. After they have their just judgment dealt out to them, the question is then open how far the Presidential prerogative shall change the Constitution and usages of the country for all time, and whether the people, through their lawful representatives, will make of an executive act a universal and permanent law of the land. The language of the proclamation itself, indeed, does not abrogate State laws, but merely suspends them in reference to certain persons and for a certain cause. The President does not proclaim that the rebel States shall, after January 1, 1863, be forever free, but that the slaves in such States at that time shall be freed; thus leaving open the question what shall be the powers of such States hereafter in reference to slaves who may be in any way introduced. Thus this act is an executive and not a legislative one, and it makes of itself no change in the Constitution, and its authority expires with the lifetime of such emancipated slaves. Of course, if carried out, its influence would be lasting, and would bring great legislative changes in its train.

We know very well the perplexities that attend this slave question, and by principle and habit we personally belong to the conservative side. We have always opposed all interference of our National Government with the legal institutions of the States, and even doubted as to excluding slavery by law of Congress from the Territories, until compelled by the cabals of the incipient rebellion to choose between such exclusion and the entire nationalizing of the institution, with the installing of John C. Breckinridge, the minion of Jefferson Davis, in the presidential chair. The rebels have made us, and nearly all the moderate conservatives, champions of the freedom of the Territories; and taught us the folly of trying to conciliate a set of despots who are content with nothing but dominion over the whole nation, and who use our neighborly kindness to destroy all good neighborhood, and turn our constitutional scruples into a pretext for overturning the Constitution itself. We do not believe in conciliating tyrants; and are convinced that the only way to act upon worshipers of power, such as the rebel chiefs generally are, is by the display of a power greater than their own. The best war rhetoric is that which is as explicit as the cannon-ball, and goes directly to the strong-hold of the rebellion. It is right then that, after a clear warning, and as soon as the declaration could be made with the dignity and force of victory, that the property of reb

When we talk of emancipating the slaves of the rebels we know what we are saying, and are not indulging in any rose-colored visions of African perfection. We do not regard the negro as wholly or invariably a sage or a saint, nor do we regard him as a fool or a fiend. He is, as compared with the historical white race, a backward and humble member of the human family; yet he is a member, and in some respects a worthy member, of the family. His worth, in the financial sense, to the white man, is most emphatically affirmed by those who most disparage his higher claims; and his masters would not sell in the market as well as he, if offered with all their talents and acquisitions to the highest bidder. His worth, morally, is not trifling; and we believe that, especially in the passive virtues of mildness, docility, reverence, the negro is more than a match for the white man; and therefore his race is more likely to take emancipation safely than any similar number of white men with the same average culture or no-culture. He is willing to be taught, and is glad to look up to a superior. Emancipation, under judicious auspices, would not destroy his wholesome subordination; and the intelligent employer would not cease to be his master in ceasing to be his owner. The forms and regulations of the new free-service would not be long in developing themselves when the nation wills it; and the former owners, who know the negro's faults and capacities, will take as much pains to use his freedom as they have taken to fix his bondage. He would soon find his status, and prove by his experience that every thing moves most safely in its own orbit; and when in their own orbit no two races can ever interfere. It is well enough to favor colonization; yet this can not solve the negro question, and can hardly rid us of the surplus of birth over death. The negroes are a suitable working-class for the South, and as such, with ample liberty to develop their gifts and use the helps of such superior minds as occasionally appear among them, they have a future before them by no means without hope.

of civilians has broken the plans of our most trusted general; but however this may be, we are confident that the same mistake will not be repeated, and that the qualities needed, even if not found in one man, are to be found in our combined military staff; and there is generalship enough in the armies of Virginia and the Potomac now to cope with the whole host of the rebellion. The battle of Antietam has considerably modified our views, and surely moved us to hail M'Clellan as the hero of the war, and the deliverer of the country from a disaster and mortification that it is terrible even to think of. Why the monstrous and almost fatal blunder of Harper's Ferry was allowed to occur, and take from this victory its fruits and honors so largely, it is probably more for the Cabinet than for him to say.

But it is of little use to agitate this question so' But we have waited long for a general to show, long as it is left in doubt whether the rebels are in an eminent degree, the two qualities of judgment stronger than the loyalists, and are able to keep, and, and fire in union. It may be that the interference even to extend, their present foothold. The question of arms is the great question, mortifying as it is to us to confess it in this nineteenth century of schools and churches, ballot-boxes and bibles. We look to our Government to give us victory in arms, and we think that we do not look to them unreasonably or in vain. We have done for them more than any people have ever done for a government within the same time; and the annals of history may be studied in vain to find a parallel to the records of voluntary American patriotism within the last year and a half. We have made up our minds fully that we have been outrageously assailed and robbed by a set of conspirators who have always had from the nation ten times more influence than is their due, and who, without any form of law or shadow of right, have set up a standard of revolt against our constitutional Government, seized our forts, customhouses, and rivers, and are trying to wrest from us half or more of our territory. We insist upon putting them down, and, willing to forgive the Government all past inefficiency, we are not disposed to wait with patience much longer.

It is the duty of the Government to harmonize and organize all the elements of military efficiency, and especially to favor the spirit that best stirs this martial enthusiasm and concentrates warlike ability. The camp is in close relations with the court, and valor waits upon honor. A merely official, business relation between the army and the Government will not do; and the soldier, whether private or general, needs other supplies than come from the pay-roll and the haversack. The Government needs to look well to the motive sentiment of the army, and send a current of electric sympathy to connect the camp with the capital, and both with the heart of the people.

In what we have said of the duty of the Government at this crisis we would not be understood as indulging a captious spirit, or as overlooking the great work that has been done to save the nation. The undoubted patriotism and integrity of the President have had much to do with our national uprise, and we do not know that any thing important to our true foreign relations has been neglected by the Administration. Our credit has been well maintained, and the means of sustaining the Government in its

True, indeed, it is that an Administration can not do every thing. With money and men it can not secure valor; and we had some fears that our troops, on account of their higher humanity and milder temper, might not cope with the ruffianly crew of the rebel army. But we find what we ought to have expected, that courage is in the character, and the man of the strongest purpose and best discipline the best soldier, and is more than a match for the bully or the braggart of greater pretensions. We have soldiers, but we are not so sure that we have adequate officers. Our soldiers, in fair battle, almost invariably overcome the enemy; yet we have more than a suspicion that they have not always been as ably commanded, and thus far we have, in the main issues of war, been sadly outgeneraled. Whose is the fault? In part, the want of first-rate officers has come from our long peace, and the great-peace and its war measures have been secured in er reward and honor given by us to literary and business success above the arts of command and the profession of arms. But the war has now lasted long enough to bring into the field all the military men whose talents had before been hidden under a bushel, or in a napkin, or on a railroad, and to educate in the electric school of actual warfare a host of new aspirants. We certainly have now a large number of well-taught, able, and considerably-experienced officers. We have the conviction that all the materials of victory are at hand, and these only wait the one commanding mind to unite and lead them. We are comforted by believing that the President and Secretary of War have come to the conclusion that strategy is not their especial profession, and have intrusted that business to undoubtedly the ablest military adviser now in the land. The troops are now gathering, and we are expecting victory.

One want has not wholly been met-our pressing eall for a general of first-class qualities in the field, a leader who unites large judgment in combining his forces and dash in launching them at the right moment upon the enemy. We have excellent military scholars, who can plan paper campaigns admirably, and excellent rangers, who can rush like lightning upon the enemy, and destroy or capture a stray regiment before it knows what is the matter.

part by such management of the treasury as has won the confidence of the people. Our navy has been vastly increased; and if in some respects the best sagacity has sometimes been wanting in planning vessels of the requisite build and force, and in having our actual fleet at the right point of action, we must allow that what has been done for the navy has surpassed our expectation, and its most hopeful operations are yet to take place. With the general plans of the War Department we have no reason to quarrel; and if judicious plans have sometimes failed on account of incompetent commanders or the interference of civilians, we must remember the immense extent of the work undertaken, and allow that a large measure of friction, delay, and disappointment is incident to all human affairs, especially to the fortune of arms. We must not ask impossibilities, nor expect a nation to be constructed or reconstructed in a day. We must take into full account the peculiar complications of our national affairs, and remember how strangely in this civil war diplomacy and strategy run into each other; and besides our friends and our enemies, we have a third section between the two, whose status is somewhat equivocal and can not by any man in his senses be regarded as easy to be adjusted or as likely to be neglected with impunity. We must make fair allowance for the position of the President, and honor him for his