entioned them in your poor
stump speeches. O, you whitened sepulchres!

O rhetors and politicians! O, powers on, before, and "behind the
throne!" In your selfish, heartless conceit, you imagine that the
Emancipation is and will be your work, and will be credited to you.
Oh yes, but by old women.

The people's blood, the fallen heroes, tore the divine work of
emancipation, from the hands of jealously watching demons. To the
shadows of the fallen the glory, and not to your round, polished or
unpolished phrases. Not the pen with which the proclamation was
written is a trophy and a relic, but the blood steaming to heaven,
the corpses of the fallen, corpses mouldering scattered on all the
fields of the Union.

_Jan. 8._--As a rapid spring tide, so higher and higher, and with
all parties--even, with the decided Copperheads--rises the haughty
contempt toward the crowned, the official, the aristocratic, and the
flatfooted (livery stable) part of Europe. Good and just! Marshy,
rotten rulers and aristocrats who scarcely can keep your various
shaky and undermined seats, you and your lackeys, you take on airs
of advisors, of guardians, of initiators of civilization! Forsooth!
I except Russia. In Russia the sovereign, his ministers and
nine-tenths of the aristocracy are in _uni sono_ with the whole
nation; and all are against slavery, against the rebels, against
traitors. The Russian government and the Russian nation often are
misrepresented by their official or diplomatic agents.

Any well organized American village in the free States contains more
genuine, moral and intellectual civilization than prevails among
European higher circles, those gilded pasteboards. This is all that
you, you conceited advisors, represent in that splendid,
all-embracing edifice of civilization! At the best you are
ornaments, or--with Wilhelm von Humboldt--you are culture, but not
the higher, man-inspiring civilization. A John S. Mill, a Godwin
Smith, and those many outside of the _would-be-something_ strata in
England, in France, almost the whole Germany, those are the
representatives of the genuine civilized Europe.

The freemen of the North, on whom you European exquisites look
superciliously down with your albino eyes, the freemen of the North,
bleeding in this deadly struggle, are the confessors for the general
civilization, and stand on the level with any martyrs, with any
progressive people on record on history.

_Jan. 9._--Quo, quo scele