The first half of the book is both the most interesting and the most valuable,—­the second half being so largely made up of personal grievances (which, if Mr. Russell had not the dignity to despise them, he might at least have been wise enough to be silent about) as to be tedious in comparison.  We regret that Mr. Russell should have been subjected to so many personal indignities for having written what we believe to have been as impartial an account of what he saw of the panic-rout which followed the Battle of Manassas as any one could have written under the same conditions,—­though we doubt if the correspondent of a French newspaper would come off much better, under like circumstances, in England.  It is not beyond the memory of man that the Duke of Wellington himself was pelted in London.  But we are surprised that Mr. Russell should have so far misapprehended his position, should have so readily learned to look upon himself as an ambassador, (we believe the “Times” is not yet recognized by our Government as anything more than a belligerent power,) as to consider it a hardship that he was not allowed to accompany General McClellan’s army to the Peninsula.  He seems to have thought that every thing happens in America, as La Rochefoucauld said of France.  We are sorry that he was not permitted to go, for he would have helped us to some clearer understanding of a campaign about whose conduct and results there seems to be plenty of passionate misjudgment and very little real knowledge.  But when should we hear the last of the vulgar presumption of an American reporter who should try to hitch himself in the same way to the staff of a British army?

Mr. Russell’s testimony to the ill effects of slavery is as emphatic, if not so circumstantial, as that of Mr. Olmsted.  It is of the more weight as coming from a man who saw the system under its least repulsive aspect.  His report also of what he heard from some of the chief plotters in the Secession conspiracy as to their plans and theories is very instructive, and deserves special attention now that their allies in the Free States are beginning to raise their heads again.  We have always believed, and our impression is strengthened by Mr. Russell’s testimony, that the Southern leaders originally intended nothing more than a coup d’etat, which, by the help of their fellow-conspirators at the North, was to put them in possession of the Government.  It is plain, also, from what Mr. Russell tells us, that the movers of the slaveholding treason reckoned confidently on aid from abroad, especially from England; and this may help Englishmen to understand that the sensitiveness of Northern people and statesmen to the open sympathy which the Rebellion received from the leading journals and public men of Great Britain was not so unreasonable as they have been taught to regard it.  Cousins of England, we feel inclined to say, remember that there is nothing so hard to bear as contempt; that there may be patriotism where