to several other members of the administration, Stanton being his special abhorrence. Of Lincoln's stories, concerning which he remarks that they "were seldom refined, but were always to the point," he relates one from which he ought to have been able to draw some useful conclusions

for his own use. In a telegram to McClellan an officer commanding a regiment on the Upper Potomac told about desperate fighting and ended with a small list of killed and wounded. Lincoln was reminded of a man who instructed his servant to touch him in some way if his stories became too large. He was telling some friends about a building in Europe a mile and a half long and half a mile high when the servant's foot descended on his toe. "How broad was the building?" asked one of the listeners. "About a foot," replied the narrator. McClellan's mind was given to hopelessly magnifying difficulties, and nothing which any human being could do had any effect in making him see how small were his lacks compared with those of his antagonist.

Petty annoyances were not wanting as a variation on the great ones. Congress had a Committee on the Conduct of the War which investigated everything and accomplished nothing. Lincoln said of it that its only purpose was to put an additional clog on his freedom and efficiency of action. There were so many people crying for peace, that

Emerson said, "It is wonderful to behold the unseasonable senility of what is called the Peace Party." Others wanted a coup d'état. Opponents of the war abroad said that the armies of England, France, and Austria, could not coerce 8,000,000 of free people to come under the government. The cabinet bickered. Every politician. or soldier or citizen who was turned off gruffly by Stanton came to the President. Sometimes he tried to soften the decrees of his War Minister, "Mars," as he sometimes called him. At other times he escaped as adroitly as he could, alleging once, when some one had appealed from Stanton, that he had very little influence with this administration but expected to have more with the next. One of the Secretary's acts, a press censorship, brought the newspaper men about the President's ears. Once when two of them in a passion were explaining the annoyances of the censorship, Lincoln, who had listened in a dreamy way, finally said:

"I don't know much about this censorship, but come downstairs and I will show you the origin of one of the pet phrases of you newspaper fellows."

Leading the way down into the basement, he opened the door of a larder, and solemnly pointed to the hanging carcass of a gigantic sheep.

There," said he, "now you know what Reve

nons à nos moutons means. It was raised by Deacon Buffum at Manchester, up in New Hampshire. Who can say, after looking at it, that New Hampshire's only product is granite?" Lincoln was once asked how it was that one caller who went to him in a rage came away smiling. The President told about the farmer who had been troubled by a big log in the middle of his field but announced one day that he had got rid of it. “How did you do it?" a neighbor asked. “It was too big to haul, too knotty to split, too wet and soggy to burn." The farmer replied that if his questioner would promise to keep the secret he would divulge it. “I ploughed around it." "I," continued Lincoln, "ploughed around Governor, but it took me three mortal hours to do it, and I was afraid every minute he would see what I was at."

Thus in almost every month of Lincoln's history as President we find the great tragedies and the little comedies, or the great comedies and the little tragedies, keeping along side by side. During this particular part of 1862 the next event of deep significance was the first battle of the new reliance. General Burnside decided upon a new plan, an advance upon Richmond by way of Fredericksburg. Lincoln said that this plan could succeed only if it was rapidly executed. Burnside was so slow that he found Lee strongly

intrenched, and was frightfully defeated at Fredericksburg on December 13. Thus one more experiment failed. Lincoln's fear that after getting rid of McClellan he should not readily do better was justified. To the Democratic Colonel W. R. Morrison Lincoln had written in November, "In considering military merit, the world has abundant evidence that I disregard politics." To Carl Schurz he was compelled to write a little later:

'If I must discard my own judgment and take yours, I must also take that of others; and by the time I should reject all I should be advised to reject, I should have none left, Republicans or others- not even yourself. For be assured, my dear sir, there are men who haveheart in it' that think you are performing your part as poorly as you think I am performing mine. certainly have been dissatisfied with the slowness of Buell and McClellan; but before I relieved them I had great fears I should not find successors to them who would do better; and I am sorry to add that I have seen little since to relieve those fears.

"I do not clearly see the prospect of any more rapid movements. I fear we shall at last find out that the difficulty is in our case rather than in particular generals. I wish to disparage no one- certainly not those who sympathize with me; but I must say I need success more than I need sympathy, and that I have not seen the so much greater evidence of getting success from my sympathizers than from those who are de

nounced as the contrary. It does seem to me that in the field the two classes have been very much alike in what they have done and what they have failed to do. In sealing their faith with their blood, Baker and Lyon and Bohlen and Richardson, Republicans, did all that men could do; but did they any more than Kearny and Stevens and Reno and Mansfield, none of whom were Republicans, and some at least of whom have been bitterly and repeatedly denounced to me as secession sympathizers? I will not perform the ungrateful task of comparing cases of failure."

Nobody could have been moved more solely by the desire to select the best men, and yet the President seemed for a long time unable to find any one competent to meet the Confederate leaders in the East. Burnside was soon dropped, immediately through differences with his subordinates, and "Fighting Joe" Hooker took his place.

Toward the end of 1862 matters in the cabinet reached their greatest tension. Seward, through his conservatism, was making enemies, but the President knew his Secretary's value too well to be shaken. Chase was also doing excellent service in his department, but he was vain, dissatisfied, extremely radical about slavery, fond of making trouble, disdainful and hostile toward Lincoln and Seward. The Senate was so hostile to Seward that a caucus voted to demand his

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