against Lee’s army, by Northern defeats on the Shenandoah and an actual dash by the South against Washington, by the further failure of Grant’s first assault upon Petersburg, and by hideous losses and some demoralisation in his army.  The candidate that the Democrats would put forward and the general principle of their political strategy were well known many weeks before their Convention met; and the Republicans already despaired of defeating them.  In the Chicago Convention there were men, apparently less reputable in character than their frank attitude suggests, who were outspoken against the war; their leader was Vallandigham.  There were men who spoke boldly for the war, but more boldly against emancipation and the faults of the Government; their leader was Seymour, talking with the accent of dignity and of patriotism.  Seymour, for the war, presided over the Convention; Vallandigham, against the war, was the master spirit in its debates.  It was hard for such men, with any saving of conscience, to combine.  The mode of combination which they discovered is memorable in the history of faction.  First they adopted a platform which meant peace; then they adopted a candidate intended to symbolise successful war.  They resolved “that this Convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war . . . justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.”  The fallacy which named the Union as the end while demanding as a means the immediate cessation of hostilities needs no demonstration.  The resolution was thus translated:  “Resolved that the war is a failure”; and the translation had that trenchant accuracy which is often found in American popular epigram.  The candidate chosen was McClellan; McClellan in set terms repudiated the resolution that the war was a failure, and then accepted the candidature.  He meant no harm to the cause of the Union, but he meant no definite and clearly conceived good.  Electors might now vote Democratic because the party was peaceful or because the candidate was a warrior.  The turn of fortune was about to arrest this combination in the really formidable progress of its crawling approach to power.  Perhaps it was not only, as contemporary observers thought, events in the field that began within a few days to make havoc with the schemes of McClellan and his managers.  Perhaps if the patience of the North had been tried a little longer the sense of the people would still have recoiled from the policy of the Democrats, which had now been defined in hard outline.  As a matter of fact it was only in the months while the Chicago Convention was still impending