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262 much to confirm this confidence, outside enthusiastic trust in the resources of their leader.

The sobering consciousness of instant peril had quickened their discernment, and the patient watchers in the swamps of Chickahominy, no longer deluded by the ignis fatuus of foreign intervention, hopes of which had been kindled anew in the Capital by the fiery speech of the Marquis of Clanricarde, regarded only, but with eager exultation, the signs in camp and country of the enemy. Mr. Seward's thirty days' draft on victory, though given to a superb army for collection, and endorsed by the credulity of the nation, had gone to protest, and Mr. Lincoln now signified his intention of calling for 500,000 additional men to enforce its payment.

No censorship of the press could restrain the clamorous discontent which burst forth North and West at this proposed call for half a million more men, and

that unfailing barometer of the hopes and fears, the joy and despair, of a purely commercial people, indicated clearly enough the gloomy forebodings of the nation. Every tick of the second-hand on the dial registered an additional $35 to the national debt, or $2,100 per minute, $126,000 an hour, $3,024,000 a day. Ragged veterans, leaning on the blackened guns in the trenches, reading the newspapers just passed across the picket lines—men who had left their ledgers and knew the mysteries of money—marked, while their faces puckered with shrewd wrinkles of successful trade, the course of the precious mercury. When Grant crossed the Rapidan, gold had gone down with a rush from 1.89 to 1.70, and though from the Wilderness on, Mr. Stanton—who was Napoleonic in his bulletins, if in nothing else—persistently chronicled success whenever battle was joined, gold rose with a like persistency after each announcement—a signal example of cynical unbelief in a truly good and great man. True, for a few days after Cold Harbor, the telegraph wires became mysteriously "out of working order," "owing," as he candidly confesses to General Dix in New York, "to violent storms on the Peninsula," but the dreadful story gradually leaked out, and gold gave a frantic bound to 2.03, to 2.30—before the end of the month