Mr. Stanton. None at all.  The soldier should know nothing about casus belli.  General Buell answered the correspondent well when he said, ’I know nothing about the cause of this war.  I am to fight the rebels and obey orders.’  Cries a general to a subaltern—­’Yonder smokes a battery—­go and take it.’  Do we issue specific instructions to the troops about the women, the children, the chickens, the forage, the mules-persons or property—­whom they encounter?  The circumstances and the exigencies of the situation determine their conduct.  A household mastiff who will pin a rebel by the throat when he passes his kennel, flying from pursuit, is just as serviceable as would prove a loyal bullet sped to the rebel’s brain.  I believe that the acknowledged fact, the necessary fact, that wherever our army advances, emancipation practically ensues, will carry more terror to the slave-owner than any other warlike incident.  But I would have them understand that this result is not our design, but a necessity of their rebellion.

Mr. Bates. You are like the last witness upon the stand—­subjected to a vigorous cross-examination upon everything gone before.  Have you ever thought what is to be the upshot of the contention?

Mr. Stanton. Restoration of the Union!

Mr. Bates. Aye, but how to be brought about?  Are not the pride and the obstinacy growing stronger every day at the South?

Mr. Stanton. ‘Men are but children of a larger growth.’  Who of us has not conquered pride and obstinacy in the nursery?  I have seen the boy of a mild-tempered father fairly admire the parent when he broke the truce of affection and vigorously thrashed him.  The large majority of the Southern people have been educated to believe the men of the North cowardly, mean, and avaricious.  Cowardly, because they persistently refused the duel.  Mean, because all classes worked, and there seemed among them no arrogance of birth.  Avaricious, because they crouched to the planters with calico and manufactures, or admired their bullying for the sake of their cotton.

And the great masses of the South have been and are learning how the present leaders have duped them upon all these points.  They have discovered we are not cowards.  Every prisoner, from the chivalric Corcoran to the urchin drummer-boy at Richmond who spat on the sentinel, has afforded proof of courage and fortitude, whilst thousands and thousands of people have secretly admired it.  The very death vacancies at family boards throughout the plantations perpetually remind the Southrons that we are not cowards in fight.  They have learned, too, that we are neither mean nor avaricious, when the millionaire merchant, whom they knew two years ago, cheerfully accepts the poor man’s lot of to-day; or when they behold all classes without one murmur hear of a million dollars per day being spent on the war, and then clamor to be taxed!  If they perceive the negroes