don this small attempt at criticism. I
should like to hear you pronounce the opening speech of Richard III.
Will you not soon visit Washington again? If you do, please call and let
me make your personal acquaintance.

_Note to Secretary Stanton. Washington. November 11, 1863_

Dear Sir, I personally wish Jacob Freese, of New Jersey, to be appointed
Colonel of a coloured regiment, and this regardless of whether he can
tell the exact shade of Julius Caesar's hair.

_The Letter to James C. Conkling. August 26, 1863_

Your letter inviting me to attend a mass meeting of unconditional Union
men, to be held at the capital of Illinois on the third day of
September, has been received. It would be very agreeable to me to thus
meet my old friends at my own home, but I cannot just now be absent from
here so long as a visit there would require.

The meeting is to be of all those who maintain unconditional devotion to
the Union; and I am sure my old political friends will thank me for
tendering, as I do, the nation's gratitude to those and other noble men
whom no partisan malice or partisan hope can make false to the nation's
life.

There are those who are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say: You
desire peace, and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we
attain it? There are but three conceivable ways. First, to suppress the
rebellion by force of arms. This I am trying to do. Are you for it? If
you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is to
give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you
should say so plainly. If you are not for force, nor yet for
dissolution, there only remains some imaginable compromise. I do not
believe any compromise embracing the maintenance of the Union is now
possible. All I learn leads to a directly opposite belief. The strength
of the rebellion is its military, its army. That army dominates all the
country and all the people within its range. Any offer of terms made by
any man or men within that range, in opposition to that army, is simply
nothing for the present, because such man or men have no power whatever
to enforce their side of a compromise, if one were made with them.

To illustrate: Suppose refugees from the South and peace men of the
North get together in convention, and frame and proclaim a compromise
embracing a restoration of the Union. In what way can that compromise be
used to keep Lee's army out of Pennsyl