ing some railroad
bridge, in times of peace!

I am told that Stanton took sides with Seward. I deny it; Stanton
remained rather passive. But were it true that Stanton, too, is
_Sewardized_,--then, Oh Mud, how powerful thou art!

In Boston, the B.s and Curtises, and all of that kidney, make a
great fuss and invoke the name of Webster. If so, they are only
_excrementa Websteriana_.

_Dec. 24._--Patriots in both Houses of Congress! your efforts to put
the conduct of the national affairs in honorable hands, and on
honorable tracks, to prevent the very life blood of the people from
being sacrilegiously wasted, to prevent the people's wealth from
being recklessly squandered; your efforts to introduce order and
spirit in certain parts of a spiritless Administration, to fill the
higher and inferior offices with men whose hearts and minds are in
the cause, and to expel therefrom, if not absolute disloyalty, at
least, the most criminal indifference to the people's cause and
welfare; your efforts to make us speak to Europe like men of sense,
and not in the senseless oracles which justly evoke the scorn and
the sneers of all European statesmen; all these your efforts as
patriots rebounded against a nameless stubbornness.

Nevertheless you fulfilled a noble, sacred and patriotic duty.
Whatever be to-day the outcry of the Flatfoots, lickspittles,
intriguers, imbeciles; whatever be the subserviency or want of civic
courage in the public press--when all these stinking, suffocating,
deleterious vapors shall be destroyed by the ever-living light of
truth, then the grateful people will bless your names, which, pure
and luminous, will shine high above the stupidity, conceit,
heartlessness, turpitude, selfish ambition, indirect and direct
treason darkening now the national horizon.

_Dec. 25._--_Christmas._ The Angel of Death hovers over thousands
and thousands of hearths. Thousands and thousands of families in
tears and shrouds. Communities, villages, huts and log-houses,
nursing their crippled, invalid, patriotic heroes! A year ago, all
was quiet on the _Potomac_--now all is quiet on the _Rappahannock_.

What a progress we have made in a year! and at the small,
insignificant cost of about sixty to eighty thousand killed or
crippled, and of one thousand millions of dollars! But it matters
not! The quietude of the official butchers and money squanderers is,
and must remain undisturbed in their mansions, whatever be the moral
lepros