THE opening month finds us relieved from the apprehension of a great maritime war. The cloud which seemed so near breaking, has at last blown over. For fear, perhaps, of raising hopes which the event might not justify, the English Cabinet had kept to themselves a despatch of Mr. Seward's, written on the day we received news in England of the capture of the Confederate envoys. The publication of this document might have mitigated, though it could by no means have removed our anxiety. On November 30th the American Secretary of State sent a message to Earl Russell and Lord Palmerston to say that, in seizing the Commissioners on board a British vessel, Captain Wilkes had acted without instructions. Mr. Seward trusted that the British Government would consider the subject in a friendly temper, and declared that it might expect the best dispositions on the part of the Government at Washington. A despatch so tranquillising should at once have

been given to the country; containing as it did, on other subjects, earnest protestations on the part of the American Cabinet, that they desired to be at peace with England. The determination of Englishmen to submit to no unwarrantable indignity would not have been affected by the intelligence that America was half prepared to recede from the dangerous position in which the zeal of a pettifogging sailor had placed her. That nothing of our preparations for war should be relaxed in consequence of the news, Lord Palmerston and his colleagues had it in their own power to make sure. By the publication of Mr. Seward's letter, the Peace party might, it is true, have found their hands strengthened. We are not prepared to say that this would have been a national calamity. War, when it is to be undertaken, should be undertaken

Peace party sounding in our ears. There are many State documents which are best forgotten in the pigeon-holes of the Foreign Office. There are some State documents which, without grave cause, should never be consigned thither for a single day.

Mr. Seward's amicable professions appear of less value, when we reflect that, if the capture of the envoys, on his own admission, is so illegal, he might have made up his mind earlier to consent to their liberation. An illustrious visitor from Europe is said to have at once recommended the prompt emancipation of Messrs. Mason and Slidell on the arrival of the news of their seizure; and Mr. Lincoln himself was personally anxious -so it is thought-to comply with the advice. Mr. Seward, as the event shows, could not have done better than follow the suggestion. He preferred to await the despatch which he must have guessed was on its way from England. He permitted himself to retain the Southern Commissioners till the long weeks had past during which he might have surrendered them with dignity, and he has made a show of yielding to a foreign demand what he did not think fit to concede to bare justice. He probably believed for some weeks that the matter was one which-if the worst came to the worst he might plausibly offer to refer to arbitration. Foreign arbitrament would have been a more popular solution of the difficulty than a bare acknowledgment that Captain Wilkes, the idol of the hour, had committed a dangerous mistake. This illusion was dispelled by the speedy manner in which all Europe pronounced judgment on the matter in debate. French public opinion, the leading French advocates, all the French journals, and the French Government itself, loudly declared their sympathy with England. General Scott re

offer of arbitration, as the intelligence that the case was prejudged, and that all prolonged negotiation was impossible. Austria and Prussia followed suit very slowly, as is the manner of German diplomatists; and the Russian minister at St. Petersburg is said to have given Mr. Lincoln the significant counsel that he had better comply with the unanswerable remonstrances of Great Britain. Mr. Seward accordingly learnt, as much from the jurisconsults of Europe as from his own law-officers, that his case was too hopeless for discussion. He does not appear to have been influenced by the opinion of any eminent jurisconsult at home. Though his long Though his long apology is not without a certain legal acumen, it is full of misconceptions with regard to international law which his own Attorney-General, had he been consulted, must surely have been competent to discover and disclose. Where, throughout the whole business, have been the lawyers of the New World? Has the North no loyal judges or advocates, who are acquainted with the principles of international law, and who have the courage to explain them? Whoever or wherever they are, they seem never to have spoken.

Viewing the matter as impartially as we can, we must confess that Mr. Seward's policy of delay was neither graceful nor intelligent, nor did his letter recover for him any lost ground. He might have saved himself all trouble by simply acknowledging, in a brief and courteous note, that, on examination of the question, he had arrived at the conclusion that Captain Wilkes was wrong. No more need

have been said. The matter would have been dismissed as suddenly as it arose. Instead of this, he has fallen into the error of explaining at length wherein he thought the American officer had been mistaken. That the Trent was not taken into port to be condemned was beyond all question a fatal flaw in the American case, and the one on which the law-officers of England are said to have most insisted. But why

demonstrate that, except in this particular, the proceedings of the San Jacinto had been unimpeachable, is not clear. He might have urged that it was not as contraband of war, but as rebel enemies, that the Confederates had been taken. He might have argued that a subject of a belligerent is not protected by a neutral flag, when the belligerent in exercise of his right of search has boarded the neutral ship. But, had he adopted this line of argument, he would have been running counter to all the principles of the rights of neutrals for which the United States are supposed to have habitually contended, and to an express dictum of Madison himself. Flying from Scylla, he has fallen into Charybdis. He took an alternative which rested on a legal blunder. Goods going bonâ fide to one neutral port from another cannot possibly be contraband, as they are performing a transit which is strictly lawful. Though it pleases Mr. Seward to assume that the law of goods may be applied indifferently to goods and persons, he cannot be sane in his proposition that a rebel enemy's envoy, wherever he is caught, is contraband of war; in which case, if Messrs. Mason and Slidell cross the English Channel in the Dover packet, the Dover packet will render itself liable to seizure, and its cargo to confiscation. Against such a monstrous theorem her Majesty's Government have found it necessary to protest. In avowing it, and grounding the release of the envoys merely on the fact that, the Trent having been let pass the contraband of war could no longer legally be condemned, Mr. Seward stops himself from all right to say that the right of neutrals will triumph by the precedent he establishes. If his law was sound, the rights of neutrals would have received a severer blow than was ever dealt them by the maritime aggressions of England, or by the decisions of English law-courts during the long war. M. Thouvenel's despatch was probably in time to suggest to Mr. Seward the idea of making political capital for neutral navies out of the surrender of the Southerners. In

his way to lay down a blundering doctrine against which the entire Continent, in the name of neutral navies, would unanimously rebel. The cause of neutral rights would have been less prejudiced had the envoys never been set free, than they would be if the world were to accept the propositions with which America accompanies their dismissal.

No great outburst of indignation in the North at the Government concessions seems to have followed the decision of the Lincoln Cabinet. The New York journals, which for some days had anticipated the necessary step, approved it when taken; and even an American public may be driven to the conclusion that instinct is not the best guide in questions of international jurisprudence. We need not insist that the Confederate emissaries were merely given up because England showed herself determined to resent their capture. Prudence is perfectly compatible with courage, and, in spite of the braggadocio of a rowdy press, it is pleasanter to be able to hope that our claims were granted because they were based upon undeniable good sense. Up to the last moment the North had been gratuitously informed on all sides by those who pretended to be competent judges of law, that the act of Captain Wilkes was justifiable and praiseworthy. What was here regarded as an outrage on the British flag, was there viewed as the strict enforcement of a legal right. There was much absurdity, ignorance, and impatience about the manner in which American opinion at once decided that the Southern Commissioners had been properly seized. But only a few of the most disrespectable newspapers dared to maintain at one and the same time the illegality and the propriety of the seizure. Captain Wilkes had probably no idea that he was committing an outrage at all. He had studied Wheaton for twenty-four hours on the subject, with the confident honesty of a sailor who imagines that anything from a law-book upwards-can be stormed in twenty-four hours. His erudition was, at least, equal to the erudition of

Admiralty did not hesitate to stamp with official approbation the act which was the result of this seaman-like investigation. The Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Secretary of the Navy endorsed the general opinion. Judge Bigelow, at Boston, assumed that the legal question presented no knot which instinct might not solve, and passed lightly on to the more grateful and profitable task of defying the British lion. Mr. Edwin James, who has judiciously conferred upon himself, since his arrival in the North, the proud title of a consummate lawyer, took the same side. Golden opinions were showered from all quarters on the captain of the San Jacinto, not for having braved, but for having applied the law. Too much importance was not likely to be attached even in Washington to the judicial impartiality of the House of Representatives; but the judgment of the House of Representatives, whatever it might be worth, was at least in favour of Captain Wilkes and his interpretations of Wheaton. The silence of the Cabinet, which it is not necessary to impute to a fear of the populace, since military events have recently rendered Mr. Lincoln's Government independent of popular clamour, tended to confirm the North in the erroneous impression that at least the question admitted of arbitration or debate. Misled by the crude assertions of the semi-informed, the uninformed public had no conception that they were applauding an act of international piracy. The fierce indignation kindled in this country by the intelligence of the boarding of the Trent opened their eyes to the fact that it was possible Captain Wilkes might not have exhausted Vattel and Wheaton in a study of twenty-four hours. M. Thouvenel's despatch arrived in Washington while the question was under discussion, and contributed to calm the enthusiasm of the entire Northern press. Suddenly, the strong feeling against surrendering the Confederate prisoners subsided. By the American