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Rh other hand, the greed and spite of the hungry crew, who were now grasping the power and spoils so long passionately craved, could not endure the thought that the prize should thus collapse in their hands. Hence, when the administration assembled at Washington, it probably had no very definite policy. Seward, who assumed to do the thinking for them, was temporizing. Colonel Baldwin supposed it was the visit, and the terrorizing of the "radical governors," which had just decided Lincoln to adopt the violent policy. They had especially asserted that the secession of the seven States, and the convening and solemn admonitions of State conventions in the others, formed but a system of bluster, or, in the vulgar phrase of Lincoln, but a "game of brag;" that the Southern States were neither willing nor able to fight for their own cause, being paralyzed by their fear of servile insurrection. Thus they had urged upon Lincoln, that the best way to secure his party triumph was to precipitate a collision. Lincoln had probably committed himself to this policy, without Seward's privity, within the last four days; and the very men whom Colonel Baldwin found in conclave with him were probably intent upon this conspiracy at the time. But when Colonel Baldwin solemnly assured Lincoln that this violent policy would infallibly precipitate the border States into an obstinate war, the natural shrewdness of the latter was sufficient to open his eyes, at least partially, and he saw that his factious counsellors, blinded by hatred and contempt of the South, had reasoned falsely; yet, having just committed himself to them, he had not manliness enough to recede. And above all, the policy urged by Colonel Baldwin would have disappointed the hopes of legislative plunder, by means of inflated tariffs, which were the real aims for which free-soil was the mask.

Thus far Colonel Baldwin's narrative proceeded. The conversation then turned upon the astonishing supineness (or blindness) of the conservatives, so-called, of the North, to the high-handed usurpations of their own rights, perpetrated by Lincoln and Seward, under pretext of subduing the seceded States, such as the suspension of habeas corpus, the State prisons, the arrests without indictment, and the martial law imposed, at the beck of the Federal power, in States called by itself "loyal." I asked: "Can it be possible that the Northern people are so ignorant as to have lost the traditionary rudiments of a free government?" His reply was, that he apprehended the Northern mind really cared nothing for