_January 25th._--Mr. Lincoln relishes the idea that if the cause of the North is victorious, no one can claim much credit for it. I put this on record for some future assumptions. Mr. Lincoln is the best judge of the merits of his clerks and lieutenants. But Mr. Lincoln forgets that the success will be due exclusively to the people--and, _per contra_, he alone will be arrayed for the failure. His friends and advisers, as the Sewards, the Weeds, the Blairs, the Hallecks, will very cleverly wash their gored hands from any complicity with him--Lincoln.
The army to be formed from Africo-Americans is to be entrusted to converted conservatives. It is feared that sincere abolitionists if entrusted with the command, may use the forces for some awful, untold aims. It is feared that abolitionists once possessed of arms and troops, may use them indiscriminately, and emancipate right and left, by friend and foe, paying no attention to the shrieks of border-States, of old women, of politicians, of cowards, of Sewardites; nay, it is feared that genuine abolitionists may carry too far their notions of absolute equality of races, and without hesitation treat the white rebels with even more severity than they threaten to treat loyal armed Africo-Americans. And why not?...
The history of England, the history of any free country has not on record a position thus anomalous, even humiliating, as is that of the patriots in Congress, thanks to Mr. Lincoln's helpless stubbornness. The patriots forcibly must consider Mr. Lincoln, even Sewardised, Blairised, Halleckised as he is, as being the only legal power for the salvation of the country. The patriots must support him, and instead of exposing the wretched faults, mistakes, often ill-will of his administration, must defend the administration against the attacks of the Copperheads, who try to destroy or disorganize the administration on account of that atom of good that it accidentally carries out on its own hook. And thus the patriots must suffer and bear patiently abuses heaped on them by the treasonable or by the stupid press, by intriguers and traitors; and patriots cannot make even the slightest attempt to vindicate their names.
_January 26th._--The visits to the White House and the "_I had a talk with the President_," are among the prominent causes of the distracted condition of affairs. With comparatively few exceptions, almost everybody expands a few inches in his own estimation, when he says to his listeners, nay, to his friends: "I had a talk with the President." Of course it is no harm in private individuals to have such _a talk_, but I have frequently observed and experienced that public men had better refrain from having any talk with him. Very often he is not a jot improved by their talk, and they come out from the interview worsted in some sort or other.