missions, and could make a junior senior if he pleased. Consequently, General McClellan, General Fremont, General Dix, and General Banks, all of whom were appointed many weeks after General Butler, take rank before him. This is a small matter, hardly worth mentioning. It is merely one instance more of the systematic snubbing with which one of the very few men of first-rate executive ability in the public service has been rewarded.

In conversing with the president upon the negro question, the general said that if it was considered necessary to abolitionize the whole army, it was only necessary to give each corps a turn of service in the extreme south, where, as General Phelps remarked, the institution exists "in all its pride and gloom."

It is worthy of note, that the only members of the diplomatic corps at Washington, who called upon the general, were the Russian minister and the representative of the free city of Bremen. The friends and the foes of the United States, also the "neutral" powers, appear to have an instinctive perception of the fact, that General Butler is the Union Cause incarnate.

The people, I need not say, gave the returning general a reception that left no doubt in his mind that his labors in the southwest were understood and appreciated by his fellow-citizens. Baltimore, Washington, New York, Boston, Lowell, Philadelphia, Harrisburgh, and Portland, have each received him with every circumstance which could enhance the dignity or the éclat of an honorable wel

come.

Or, to use the language of the Richmond Examiner:

"After inflicting innumerable tortures upon an innocent and unarmed people; after outraging the sensibilities of civilized humanity by his brutal treatment of women and children; after placing bayonets in the hands of slaves; after peculation the most prodigious, and lies the most infamous, he returns, reeking with crime, to his own people, and they receive him with acclamations of joy in a manner that befits him and becomes themselves. Nothing is out of keeping; his whole career and its rewards are strictly artistic in conception and in execution. He was a thief. A sword that he had stolen from a woman-the niece of the brave Twiggs-was presented to him as a reward of valor. He had violated the laws of God and man. The law-makers of the United States voted him thanks, and the preachers of the Yankee gospel of blood came to

him and worshiped him. He had broken into the safes and strong boxes of merchants. The New York Chamber of Commerce gave him a dinner. He had insulted women. Things in female attire lavished harlot smiles upon him. He was a murderer, and a nation of assassins have deified him. He is at this time the representative man of a people lost to all shame, to all humanity, all honor, all virtue, all manhood. Cowards by nature, thieves upon principle, and assassins at heart, it would be marvelous, indeed, if the people of the North refused to render homage to Benjamin Butler-the beastliest, bloodiest poltroon and pickpocket the world ever saw." Or, to borrow the words of the New York World:

"The warm applause.with which he was greeted by a great pubfic assembly in this Christian city, is a phenomenon as shocking to a cultivated moral sense as the mode of propagating religion in ages when the rack and the stake were approved means of grace. This discreditable applause is a new testimony to the barbarizing effects of civil war. It exemplifies the rude logic of violent passions, which, assuming a sacred end for its premises, infers that any means are justifiable for its attainment."

Or we might quote the comments of the London Times, since there is the most perfect accord on this subject between rebels, peace democrats and foreign neutrals.

Perhaps, however, the reader may incline to the opinion of the hundred merchants of New York, as expressed in their letter inviting the general to a public dinner:

"They share with you the conviction that there is no middle or neutral ground between loyalty and treason; that traitors against the government forfeit all rights of protection and of property; that those who persist in armed rebellion, or aid it less openly but not less effectively, must be put down and kept down by the strong hand of power and by the use of all rightful means, and that so far as may be, the sufferings of the poor and misguided, caused by the rebellion, should be visited upon the authors of their calamities. We have seen, with approbation, that in applying these principles, amidst the peculiar difficulties and embarrassments incident to your administration in your recent command, you have had the sagacity to devise, the will to execute, and the courage to enforce the measures which they demanded, and we rejoice at the suc cess which has vindicated the wisdom and the justice of your offi

cial course.

In thus congratulating you upon these results, we believe that we express the feeling of all those who most earnestly desire the speedy restoration of the Union in its full integrity and power."

The public dinner was declined. "I too well know," replied the general, "the revulsion of feeling with which the soldier in the field, occupying the trenches, pacing the sentinel's weary path in the blazing heat, or watching from his cold bivouac the stars shut out by the drenching cloud, hears of feasting and merry-making at home by those who ought to bear his hardships with him, and the bitterness with which he speaks of those who, thus engaged, are wearing his uniform. Upon the scorching sand, and under the brain-trying sun of the gulf coast, I have too much shared that feeling to add one pang, however slight, to the discomfort which my fellow-soldiers suffer, doing the duties of the camp and field, by my own act, while separated momentarily from them by the exigencies of the public service."

Not the less did the city of New York respond to the sentiments of the merchants' letter. The scene at the Academy of Music, on the evening of the 2d of April, 1863, when General Butler advanced to the front of the stage, will never be forgotten by the youngest person who witnessed it. The house was crowded to the remotest standing-place of the amphitheater. The immense stage was filled with the citizens of whom New York is proudest. When the gencral appeared, the audience sprang to their feet, and gave, not three cheers, nor three times three and one cheer more, but a unanimous, long-sustained roar of cheers, with a universal waving of hats and nandkerchiefs. Several minutes elapsed before silence was restored. General Butler spoke for two hours, interrupted at every other sentence with enthusiastic applause. At Boston, in old Faneui! Hall, he could not escape from the crowd till he had shaken three thousand hands.

Since the return of General Butler to the North, he has, on all occasions, public and private, given to the administration a most hearty and unwavering support. A man less magnanimous, or less patriotic, would have been tempted to, at least, a silent resentment at the censure of his conduct implied in his sudden and unexplained recall, and the repeated refusal of the government to comply with the desire expressed on so many occasions for his employment in

the cabinet and in the field. On the contrary, he has used the whole of his influence in sustaining the government.

"The present government," he said, in his speech of April 2d, at New York, was not the government of my choice. I did not vote for it, nor for any part of it; but it is the government of my country; it is the only organ by which I can exert the force of the country to protect its integrity; and as long as I believe that gov ernment to be honestly administered, I will throw a mantle over any mistakes that I may think it has made, and support it heartily, with hand and purse, so help me God! I have no loyalty to any man or men. My loyalty is to the government; and it makes no difference to me who the people have chosen to administer the government. So long as the choice has been constitutionally made, and the persons so chosen hold their places and powers, I am a traitor and a false man if I falter in my support. This is what I understand to be loyalty to a government."

Perhaps a few sentences and paragraphs from General Butler's recent speeches may be in place here, to indicate his present pinions upon the momentous issues upon which the people are called, from time to time, to express their judgment.

SLAVERY.

"I think I may say that the principal members of my staff, and the ¿rominent officers of my regiments, without any exception, went out to New Orleans hunker democrats of the hunkerest sort; for it wa but natural that I should draw around me those whose views were similar to my own; and every individual of the number has come to precisely the same belief on the question of slavery, as I put forth in my farewell address to the people of New Orleans. This change came about from seeing what all of them saw, day by day. In this war the entire property of the South is against us, because almost the entire property of the South is bound up in that institution. This is a well-known fact, probably; but I did not become fully aware of it until I had spent some time in New Orleans. The South has $163,000,000 of taxable property in slaves, and $163,000,000 in all other kinds of property. And this was the cause why the merchants of New Orleans had not remained loyal. They found themselves ruined-all their property being loaned upon planters' notes, and mortgages upon plantations and slaves, all of which property is now worthless. Again I learned, what I did not know before, that this is not a rebellion against us, but simply a rebellion to perpetuate power in the hands of a few slave-holders. At first

I did not believe that slavery was the cause of the rebellion, but attributed it to Davis, Slidell, and others, who had brought it about to make political triumphs by which to regain their former ascendency. The rebellion is against the humble and poorer classes; and there were in the South large numbers of secret societies dealing in cabalistic signs, organized for the purpose of perpetuating the power of the rich over the poor. It was feared that these common people would come into power, and that three or four hundred thousand men could not hold out against eight millions. The first movement of these men was to make land the basis of political power, and that was not enough, for land could not be owned by many persons. Then they annexed land to slaves, and divided the property into movable and immovable.

"I am not generally accused of being a humanitarian-at least, not by my southern friends. When I saw the utter demoralization of the people, resulting from slavery, it struck me that it was an institution which should be thrust out of the Union. I had, on reading Mrs. Stowe's book-Uncle Tom's Cabin-believed it to be an overdrawn, highly-wrought picture of southern life; but I have seen with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, many things which go beyond her book, as much as her book does beyond an ordinary school-girl's novel. "Yes, no right-minded man could be sent to New Orleans without returning an unconditional anti-slavery man, even though the roof of the houses were not taken off, and the full extent of the corruption exposed.

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"The war can only be successfully prosecuted by the destruction of slavery, which was made the corner-stone of the confederacy. This is the second time in the history of the world that a rebellion of property-holders against the lower classes and against the government was ever carried on. The Hungarian rebellion was one of that kind, and that failed, as must every rebellion of men of property against government and against the rights of the many. One of the greatest arguments which I can find against slavery is the demoralizing influences it exerts upon the lower white classes, who were brought into secession by the hundred because they ignorantly sup posed that great wrong was to be done them by the Lincoln government, as they termed it, if the North succeeded. Therefore, if you meet an old hunker democrat, and send him for sixty days to New Orleans, and he comes back a hunker still, he is merely incorrigible. There is one thing about the president's edict of emancipation to which I would call attention. In Louisiana he had excepted from freedom about eighty-seven thousand slaves. These comprise all the negroes held in the Lafourche district, who have been emancipated already for some time under the law which frees slaves taken in rebellious territory by our armies. Others of these negroes had been freed by the proclamation of September, which declared all slaves to be free whose owners should be in arms on the first