with the cause of rebellion.  The famous “Ostend Conference” had had its doings and designs so thoroughly aired in the columns of the English press, that we cannot suppose either the editors or the readers ignorant of the spirit or intentions of those who controlled the policy of that Administration.  Early information likewise crossed the water to them of the discreditable and infamous doings and plottings of members of the Cabinet, evidently in league with the fomenting treachery.  They knew that the head of the Navy Department had either scattered our ships of war to the ends of the earth, or had moored them in helpless disability at our dockyards,—­that the head of the War Department had been plundering the arsenals of loyal States to furnish weapons for intended rebellion,—­that the head of the Treasury Department was purloining its funds,—­and that the President himself, while allowing national forts to be environed by hostile batteries, had formally announced that both Secession itself and all attempts to resist it were alike unconstitutional,—­the effect of which grave opinion was to let Secession have its way till Coercion would seem to be not only unconstitutional, but unavailing.  Our English kinsfolk also knew that our prominent diplomatic agents abroad, representing solemn treaty relations with them of this nation as a unit, under sacred oaths of loyalty to it, and living on generous grants from its Treasury, were also in more or less of active sympathy with traitorous schemes.  So far, it must be owned, there was little in the promise of whatever might grow from these combined enormities to engage the confidence or the good wishes of true-hearted persons on either side of the water.

But whatever power of mischief lay in this marvellous combination of evil forces, so malignly working together, the Administration in which they found their life and whose agencies they employed was soon to yield up its fearfully desecrated trust.  A new order of things, representing at least the spirit and purpose of that philanthropy and public righteousness to which our English brethren had for years been prompting us, was to come in with a new Administration, already constitutionally recognized, but not as yet put into power.  It was asking but little of intelligent foreigners of our own blood and language, that they should make due allowance for that recurring period in the terms of our Government—­as easily turned to mischievous influences as is an interregnum in a monarchy—­by which there is a lapse of four months between the election and the inauguration of our Chief Magistrate.  A retiring functionary may work and plan and provide an immense amount of disabling, annoying, and damaging experience to be encountered by his successor.  That successor may at a distance, or close at hand, be an observer of all this influence; but whether it be simply of a partisan or of a malignant character, he is powerless to resist it, and good taste and the proprieties of