Yet a blunt statement that abolition would be a _sine qua non_ in any arrangements for peace, emanating directly from the President, as a declaration of his policy, would be very costly in the pending campaign, and would imperil rather than advance the fortunes of him who had this consummation at heart, and would thereby also diminish the chance for the consummation itself. So at last he seems to have left the war Democrats to puzzle over the conundrum, and decide as best they could. Of course the doubt affected unfavorably the votes of some of them. A measure of the mischief which was done by these suspicions and by Greeley's assertions that the administration did not desire peace, may be taken from a letter, written to Mr. Lincoln on August 22 by Mr. Henry J. Raymond, chairman of the National Executive Committee of the Republican party. From all sides, Mr. Raymond says, "I hear but one report. The tide is setting strongly against us." Mr. Washburne, he writes, despairs of Illinois, and Mr. Cameron of Pennsylvania, and he himself is not hopeful of New York, and Governor Morton is doubtful of Indiana; "and so of the rest." For this melancholy condition he assigns two causes: the want of military successes, and the belief "that we are not to have peace in any event under this administration until slavery is abandoned. In some way or other the suspicion is widely diffused that we can have peace with union, if we would." Then even this stanch Republican leader suggests that it might be good policy to sound Jefferson Davis on the feasibility of peace "on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution,--all other questions to be settled in a convention of the people of all the States." The President might well have been thrown into inextricable confusion of mind, betwixt the assaults of avowed enemies, the denunciations and predictions of inimical friends, the foolish advice of genuine supporters. It is now plain that all the counsel which was given to him was bad, from whatsoever quarter it came. It shows the powerfulness of his nature that he retained his cool and accurate judgment, although the crisis was such that even he also had to admit that the danger of defeat was imminent. To Mr. Raymond's panic-stricken suggestions he made a very shrewd response by drafting some instructions for the purpose of sending that gentleman himself on the mission to Mr. Davis. It was the same tactics which he had pursued in dispatching Mr. Greeley to meet the Southerners in Canada. The result was that the fruitlessness of the suggestion was admitted by its author.