which we would never otherwise have discovered. Hence I am persuaded that school children learn what is of far more value to them in the play-ground if they have one, than from their teachers or books, however valuable those portions may be; and that instruction under private tutors for the young is usually a misfortune, and if from choice, ordinarily a mistake. Know Thyself was the instruction of the Greek philosopher. But there is no way of getting that instruction so good as seeing our own infirmities as well as our virtues reflected as by a mirror in the conduct of another. We are all born blind to our own infirmities.

Mr. Eames had graduated first in his class at Harvard College. He married a daughter of Judge Campbell, when Surrogate of New York. Shortly after his marriage he was invited by Bancroft to a clerical position in the Navy Department of which Bancroft was head. Later through the influence and friendship of Governor Marcy, when Secretary of State, Eames was sent as commissioner to the Sandwich Islands and subsequently as minister to Venezuela. During the Civil War Gideon Welles, then Secretary of the Navy, appointed him special counsel for that department, in which he achieved distinction and what for him was wealth. He had just completed a house in Washington which probably represented all the wealth he had invested.

On the 22d of March I called upon Mrs. Frank Blair Sr., whom President Van Buren had been heard to speak of as the best politician in Washington. She soon revealed to me that the political situation of the country was still uppermost in her mind. She denounced the majority in Congress and its cruelty toward the south vehemently. She thought Jefferson Davis one of the greatest men she ever knew - or, "that ever lived." Presently her husband came in, looking a little more thin than formerly, but apparently as well in health as ever I remembered to have seen him. He seemed very much excited about a recent confiscation speech of Thaddeus Stevens; thought his policy would be pursued in the next Congress, and that we were repeating some of the worst phenomena of the French Revolution.

He told me, what I should never have otherwise suspected, that the proposal which he carried to Jefferson Davis [in 1864] was that he should leave Richmond, lead his army into Mexico, and drive Emperor Maximilian into the sea, that Davis was disposed to do it, had the proposition come to him in proper form; that is, if Lincoln had approved of it and had consented to go down with

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Seward and meet Davis. Blair then wrote a proposition which he read to Davis and which Davis accepted. Lincoln asked Blair if Davis had not sent a copy of his proposal to Napoleon. Blair replied in the negative. He had not left a copy; he only read the paper. Blair thought the reason Davis did not stick to his first proposition was that the glory of founding a new empire in Mexico for the Confederates would have inured to Lee and not to him. My own impression was that Davis never for one moment seriously entertained such an absurd project, but pretended to think well of it for the purpose of having a proposal made in a way to compromise our government. When he should have got the proposal from Lincoln, he would possess all he needed for operating on the Paris and London markets. Lee said 25,000 men would be enough to finish Mexico. Grant was to follow Lee as if pursuing him, and occasionally skirmishing with him, to the frontier, and should it seem to become necessary for driving the French out, to follow Lee into Mexico. Blair said he went to the meeting first with the privity of Grant but without the knowledge of Lincoln — or rather without Lincoln's knowing what he meant to propose. When Blair returned, he reported what had passed between him and Davis to Lincoln, whom he persuaded to go down and meet Davis. Blair did not report to Seward because he and Seward did not draw well together and he doubted whether Seward would promote a negotiation conducted over his head by a third party. Evidence that these doubts were not imaginary Mr. Blair professed to find in an allusion in Seward's dispatch to Mr. Adams and myself, in which he said in effect that it often happened that persons who were most active in provoking war are most ready to make peace.

Most of the Cabinet, Seward being of the number, were indisposed to reinforce Fort Sumter. Blair's son Montgomery, Postmaster General, was the only one in favor of this step, which brought on the war. It was decided in the negative. Old Mr. Blair said he met the President just after the cabinet meeting and said to him, "Mr. Lincoln, not to reinforce Fort Sumter is high treason!" and there he left him without another word. The next day orders were given to reinforce Fort Sumter. This was the provocation of war to which Mr. Seward is supposed to have alluded in his dispatch.

Mr. Blair said that Davis told him the French government had already purchased the James River and the Kanawha Canal and

expected in case of separation to have thus secured the control of Hampton Roads, the best harbor on the coast south of New York. He said that the French tried to flank our republic on the south in Mexico, as the English had tried to do on the north during Jackson's time, when they conspired to annex New England to Canada.

FROM MY DIARY

March 30th. Called on General Grant in Washington. He looks like the current photographs, but a little thinner. He approached me evidently uncertain what sort of a person he was to meet, and apparently anxious not to commit himself in any way until better informed. At first General Badeau' and I had to do the talking. Grant said little, and looked on the floor, and seemed pale. By and by he grew communicative. He asked about France and her leaving Mexico. "Yes," I said, "though she did not leave perhaps as soon as you wished, she has left." The General said that was so, and asked if the Emperor [Napoleon III] was not in a rather shaky position. He said it seemed so to him, perhaps because he disliked him so. I replied that physically he was an invalid, but not more likely to die at present than other people.

Grant said it was reported to him upon what he deemed sufficient authority, that Bazaine had become worth two and a half millions of dollars; that he had a couple of stores in Mexico which were stocked with goods that came in for him free of duty and from which therefore he had derived large profits; that the other day a Liberal general caught $350,000 on its way out of the country, and Bazaine asked him if he would not be good enough to restore it to him, on the ground that it was his private property. This humiliating and undignified appeal, however, was not rewarded with success. Grant said he guessed that when Bazaine got home to France, it would turn out that he had married a very rich wife, like the officer in the quartermaster's department in his earlier military days who was always attributing the apparently incomprehensible physical comforts he enjoyed to the death of his Uncle Sam.

'Adam Badeau, brevet brig-gen. and aide-de-camp.