who was too young to understand the President's fatherly solicitude, and who drilled and drilled but did not go forward to fight. In the light of the troubles that the President had with embryo-Generals one can appreciate the narrative that a caller finding him pondering over some papers asked what he was doing and got the reply, "O nothing much--just making a few Generals." And once when a message bearer gravely told him that the enemy had captured a couple of Generals and some mules, he replied, "What a pity to lose all those mules." Bull Run had made the people more cautious about crying "on to Richmond," and so all Washington took holidays and enjoyed going out to see McClellan's grand army manoeuvres--all except the President for whom there was to be no more joy--no more holidays. To a sympathetic friend he replied, "I want not sympathy for myself but success for our cause." Again the wisdom of the President was tested and proved in the case of Mason and Slidell, the Confederate commissioners to Great Britain, whom a Federal warship had taken from a British mail packet. A British ultimatum demanded immediate restitution and apology, while public sentiment at home demanded that they be retained; but the President averted trouble with England by sending the commissioners on their way. In the President's message to Congress, some days later, he made no reference at all to this affair because he knew when to be silent as well as when to explain. Evidence of the true greatness and the forgiveness of the President and that he put the cause far above any personal consideration is in the fact of his appointing Edwin M. Stanton Secretary of War, to succeed Cameron to whom he had given the post as Minister to Russia. Stanton was a Democrat, a friend of McClellan, and had never ceased to speak of Lincoln with that gross abuse with which he had greeted Lincoln the lawyer in the McCormick case at Cincinnati in 1859. But with all Stanton's injustice to Lincoln--his revilings and his insults--he accepted the cabinet place when Lincoln offered it to him. But if Stanton was truculent, a tyrant and a bully--infinitely more important--he was honest and strong in office and broke the ring of grafters who had been robbing the government, and did his work heroically. That was what the President wished. And Stanton soon learned as others learned that Lincoln was master of every situation. Lincoln's friends opposed the appointment of Stanton and reminded the President of how crudely Stanton had treated him at Cincinnati, but the President had no thought for himself or his own future. He was concerned only to get the men who could best serve the great cause.