y dwelling therein!

A young man from New England, (whom I saw for the first time,) told
me that my Diary stirred up the youth. Oh, if so, then I feel happy.
Youth! youth! you are all the promise and the realization! But why
do you suffer yourselves to be crushed down by the upper-crust of
senile nincompoops? Oh youth, arise, and sun-like penetrate through
and through the magnitude of the work to be accomplished, and save
the cause of humanity!

_Dec. 25._--As it was and is in all Revolutions and upheavals, so
here. A part of the people constitute the winners, in various ways,
(through shoddy names, jobs, positions, etc.) while the immense
majority bleeds and sacrifices. Here many people left poorly
salaried desks, railroads, shops, &c. to become great men but poor
statesmen, cursed Generals, and mischief-makers in every possible
way and manner. The people's true children abandoned homes,
families, honest pursuits of an industrious and laborious life--in
one word, their ALL, to bleed, to be butcherer, to die in the
country's cause. The former are the winners, the sacrificers, and
the butchers; the second are the victims.

The evidence before the War Committee shows, to a most disgusting
satiety, that General Halleck is exclusively a red-tapist, and a
small pettifogger, who is unworthy to be even a non-commissioned
officer; General Burnside an honest, well intentioned soldier,
thoroughly brave, but as thoroughly destitute of generalship;
General Sumner an unquestionably brave but headlong trooper; and
Hooker alone in possession of all the capacity and resources of a
captain. General Woodbury's evidence is that of a man under
difficulties, on whom his superiors in rank have thrown the
responsibility of their own crime.

Halleck alone is responsible for the non-arrival of the pontoons.
Burnside could not look for them; it was the duty of Halleck to
order some of the semi-geniuses of his staff to the special duty of
seeing to their delivery at Fredericksburgh, to give them necessary
power to use roads, steamers, water, animals and men for
transportation, and make it a capital responsibility if Sumner finds
not the pontoons on the spot, and at the precise day and hour when
he wanted them. Then, Gen. Meigs, who coolly asserts that he "gave
orders." O yes! but he never dreamed it was his duty to look for
their execution. The fate of the campaign depended upon the
pontoons, and Halleck-Meigs "gave orders," and there was a