Stanton._ With great respect to your Honor (as we say in court), I
deem it a great mistake to neglect newspaper suggestions, however
provincial. 'Do you hear (as Hamlet says), let them be well used; for
they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.' And your
metropolitan editor, after all, follows the bent of the public opinion
of the provinces as he scissors it from his thousand and one exchanges.
The village or country editor has time to mix among the people, and
hears them talk to reproduce it artistically. The city editor finds
little time for this. Besides, there _is_ very little of reliable public
opinion amid cities. The American mind is styled fickle; so it may be in
the great marts. From _them_ come your sensations and spasms. The
interior is more stable, and less swayed by impulses. Aggregate a
hundred county editorials all over the North, then strike an average,
and you will find the product in the last big journal. The misfortune of
Washington social life is that we walk in it over a circle. Hither come
'needy knife-grinders,' and axe-sharpeners, and place-hunters, who say
what they think will be agreeable to the ears of power. But the other
kind of mails, presided over by Mr. Blair, bring us wholesome, although
sometimes disagreeable, truths. They are worth attending to, Mr.
President. Let us 'strike,' but let us 'hear.'

_Mr. Seward._ In the matter of newspapers, my son Fred and I divide
reading. He distils the metropolitan gazettes, and I those of England
and France. Then we exchange commodities at breakfast time. Fred, having
been an editor, can boil down the news very rapidly, and so put its
essence into our coffee-pot. The foreign journals, however, have so much
in them that is dissimulative and latent, they require more care and
discernment. Mr. Hunter aids me in dissecting them.

_Mr. Lincoln._ You are the son of an editor, Montgomery; how do you
stand on this subject of Colfax's bill to carry all the papers in your
mails? The rebel postmaster-general, in _his_ report, made, you
remember, an elaborate argument to justify the Jeff Davis law, which
forbids the sending of newspapers and periodicals by expressmen.

_Mr. Blair._ When Colfax will accept as an amendment a prohibition of
telegrams, and the obliging our mails to transmit _all_ intelligence,
then I will consider of his views.

_Mr. Smith._ Well said; as good an extract that from the last edition of
Blair's rhetoric as could be wis