he is hardly behind the “Saturday Review” in the terrible epithets he bestows upon the man who he acknowledges “was associated with the grandest triumph of the Federal arms, and by some means or other preserved New Orleans to the Union with but little cost of either men or money.”  It is rather late to renew discussion about the notorious order relating to the women of the subjected city.  But Mr. Dicey chooses to express his belief in an infamous intention of General Butler at the time of its issue,—­though he declares that “the strictest care was taken lest the order should be abused,” and that the “Southern ladies [?] were grossly insulting in their behavior to the Union soldiers, using language and gestures which, in a city occupied by troops of any other nation, would have subjected them, without orders, to the coarsest retaliation.”  To which we have only to reply, that General Butler may be a villain, but that he is certainly not a fool.  Nobody doubts that he has military or civil aspirations for the future, and, for such ends, if for nothing else, wishes the approbation of his loyal countrymen.  Now Mr. Dicey testifies to “the almost morbid sentiment of Americans in the Free States with regard to women”:  he tells us that “it renders them ridiculously susceptible to female influences”; also, that this same “sentiment” among us “protects women from the natural consequences of their own misconduct.”  These characteristics of his countrymen are just as familiar to General Butler as they are patent to Mr. Dicey; and we hold it to be simply incredible that one who is at least a very shrewd politician used language which he intended should convey a meaning that must necessarily consign his future career to privacy and infamy.  It is perhaps not wonderful that men who have deluged their country in blood, to propagate a system which consigns unborn millions to enforced harlotry, should put an evil interpretation upon the indignant stigma applied to acts which, in civilized States, come from one class of women, and are designed for one purpose.  Neither is it very astonishing that such persons as have been employed to pump the New-York sewers into the cloaca maxima which sets towards us from Printing-House Square should share the sensitive chastity of the slave-masters whose work they are put to do.  But it is passing strange that a gentleman so fair and reasonable as Mr. Dicey, one so appreciative of the moral tone which Northern society demands of its representatives, should join in an accusation whose absurdity is only lost in its infinite offence.

There are small inaccuracies, as well as occasional instances of carelessness or repetition, in these volumes, which, had circumstances allowed time for revision, might have been avoided.  It would require the “Pathfinder” himself to discover “Fremont Street” in the city where we write; the “Courier” is not “the most largely circulated of any Boston paper”; and our Ex-Mayor “Whiteman”