miniously desecrated than by this comparison.

_Dec. 22._--So, then, Sathanas Seward remains, and Mr. Lincoln
scorns the advice of the wisest and most patriotic Senators. To be
snubbed by Lincoln and Seward, is the greatest of all possible
humiliations. Border-state politicians, Harrises, Brownings and
other etceteras of grain, are the confidential advisers. Political
manhood is utterly, and to all seeming, irretrievably lost.

Stanton still holds with Seward. _Embrassons nous, et que cela
finisse._

How brilliantly do even the very basest times of any government
whatever, Parliamentary, royal or despotic, compare with what I now
daily see here in the capital of the great republic!

Since the earliest existence of political parties, rarely, if ever,
has a party been in such a difficult, and, at times, even disgraceful
position, as that of the patriots of both houses of Congress. Against
the combined attacks of all stripes of traitors, such as ultra
Conservatives, Constitutionalists, Copperheads and pure and impure
Democrats, the patriots must defend an administration which they
themselves condemn, and with the personnel of which, (Stanton and
Wells excepted,) they have no sympathy and no identity of ideas. They
must defend an administration which opposes even measures which they,
the patriots, demand,--an administration which, in the recent
elections, either betrayed or disgraced the whole party, and which
brought into suspicion, if not into actual contempt, the name, nay,
even the principles of the Republicans. And thus the patriots have the
dead weight to support, and are wholly unsupported. The narrow-minded
and shallow Republican press, has no comprehension of the difficulty
of the position in which the patriots are placed; and that press,
being in various ways connected with the administration, rarely, if
ever, supports the patriots, and even mostly neutralises their best
and noblest efforts. Thus, in the move against Seward, and for a
reform in the Cabinet, the enlightened and patriotic Republican press
of New York, was either persistently mute or hostile to the movement.
Every day I am the more firmly convinced that Seward is the great
stumbling block alike to Mr. Lincoln and the country at large.

_Dec, 22._--Utterly incapable as is McClellan, and absolutely
unfitted by nature to be a great captain as is Burnside, yet I think
it quite clear that neither of them would have blundered quite so
terribly if he