This message is so utterly beneath contempt that we had at one time determined to let it pass without comment.
Having altered that resolution, we shall dismiss it in as few words as possible.
It is certain that nobody assisted
Lincoln in the concoction and execution of this famous performance.
Byron and
Scott were not more surely the authors of
Chlide Harold and Waverley than
Lincoln is author of this message.
There are earmarks in every sentence which it is impossible to mistake.
Other men are as feeble, and others again as vulgar.
But no other man ever blended folly and vulgarity in such exquisite union.
To lie, we have often said, is natural to a Yankee.
But
Lincoln does not even lie with judgment.
The object of a lie is to deceive.
Lincoln deceives nobody.
For instance, when he says that the war expenses for the fiscal year have been but $474,000,000, every man who ever heard of the force he has set on foot sees at once that he is lying.
In the old army the total military expenses were found, when added up, to average $1,000 per man per annum.
The pay of
Lincoln's soldiers is much greater than the pay of the old army.
But allowing it to be the same, he has had on his muster rolls, and drawing pay, for more than a year, 750,000 men, which gives $750,000,000. Besides, he has 380 ships of war in commission, which must cost a prodigious sum.
Again, we are told that the ‘"public credit has been fully maintained."’ The bankers of New York and
Boston, who have been paying premiums of 30, 33, and 35 per cent for gold, for the last six months, will believe this, of course.
They will believe it only the more strongly when they see the Banks called on to fork over their notes, and take in exchange U. S. bonds, which they are then to deposit and receive Treasury notes at six per cent interest.
Of course we suppose the Banks cannot find customers at home to take their notes at six per cent; otherwise they would not be very eager to lend them to the
Government.
This is certainly a very pretty scheme to raise the wind, and indicates a very satisfactory condition of the public credit.
In the third place, it is more than insinuated that the
Confederate authorities excited the
Indian massacres in
Minnesota.
This lie is too stupid even for
Lincoln.
It must have been suggested by somebody a shade more stupid than himself.
The
State of Missouri, the nearest
Confederate State to
Minnesota, is separated from it by at least five hundred miles. If, however, the
Confederate authorities had done so, they would only have imitated
Lincoln himself, who is trying to kindle a servile war in the
Confederacy.
His bad conscience leads him astray.
The Confederate authorities are gentlemen and humane man. They are incapable of imitating his atrocities.
Because he is a brute, he has no right to conclude that everybody else is so.
Fourthly and lastly,
Lincoln tells us that the relations of his Government with foreign powers are satisfactory — not so happy as they might be, but still pretty fair.
He says nothing of the proposal submitted by the
French Emperor, which indicates that the relations in question are anything else than satisfactory; but he lets it leak out that in June last, before
McClellan was driven, like a hunted wolf from den to den on the
Chickahominy, there was a prospect of inducing the nations of
Europe to recall the recognition of the
Confederates as belligerents.
That notable exploit of the ‘"young
Napoleon,"’ however, put a new face upon affairs, and the recognition was not recalled.
A large part of the message is devoted to the compensation emancipation scheme, as set forth in his inaugural.
This is to finish the war at once, and, as he seems to think, without bloodshed.
The negroes, he has found out, instead of being in our way, are a great assistance to the rebellion.
They stay at home and work the crops, while their masters go abroad and fight.
Emancipate them, and pay the good Union men who own them, and the war will be over.
We wonder if he is really a downright fool.
The negroes are to be colonized, if he can get anywhere to colonize them; or they are to go North, if the
Yankees will let them; or they are to stay at home and live on a footing of equality with their former masters.
This is the way the rebellion is to be stopped, and for this consummation
Lincoln has shed a perfect sea of blood.
Nothing in the whole message is more ridiculous than the estimate of the probable population of what was once the
United States in 1920--an estimate borrowed from some of the old ‘"manifest destiny"’ articles of the New York
Herald.
The country cannot be separated, he thinks, because the
Mississippi runs entirely through it, and because there are no natural boundaries between the separate portions!
We wonder if he ever heard of the
Rhine and the
Danube, of the nations that live on the opposite shores, and of the independent States of
Germany and
Italy, of
Spain and
Portugal.
This message, the last and poorest of all
Lincoln's papers, is but a compound of vulgarity and folly.
