All this was simply weakness; but in turning from the conduct of the Finances by the administration, to consider its management of Filibusterism, we pass from the consideration of acts of mere debility to the consideration of acts which have a color of duplicity in them.  On the Filibusters, as on the Finances, the First Annual Message of the President was outspoken and forcible.  It characterized the past and proposed doings of William Walker and his crew, as the common sense and common conscience of the world had already characterised them, as nothing short of piracy and murder.  Recognizing the obligations of fraternity and peace as the rule of right in international relations, it pledged the utmost vigilance and energy of the Federal powers against every semblance of freebootery.  In pursuance of this promise, orders were issued to the various civil and naval authorities, (orders not very clear, it is true, but clear enough to bear but one meaning in honest and simple minds,) to the effect that they should maintain a sharp watch, and execute a summary arrest of every person suspected of or discovered in unlawful enterprises.  The authorities on land, to whom it was easy to hold secret communication with Washington, were found to have very blind eyes and very slippery hands.  General Walker and his confederates were taken at New Orleans, but they passed through the courts far more rapidly than goods are apt to pass through the custom-houses.  Under a merely nominal recognizance, he sailed away with flying colors, and amid the plaudits of an admiring crowd, among whom, it is to be presumed, the authorities took care to be only not too conspicuous.

But the authorities on the sea, who could not so readily get a cue from Wellington, with the directness, in construing orders, which is the habit of the military mind, took their instructions at the word.  Commanded to intercept all marauders and pirates, they kept a look-out for Walker.  He eluded the guns of Captain Chatard, but Commodore Paulding seized him in the very act of invading a friendly soil.  Hoisting him on board of a war-ship, he returned him in pressing haste to the President.  Commodore Paulding, who had read the Message, and read the instructions of Secretary Cass, doubtless supposed that black meant black, and white, white.  Perhaps, also, in the unsophisticated pride with which he contemplated the promptitude and decision of his action, in saving an innocent people from a sanguinary ruffian, and in maintaining the honor of his country unsullied, dim visions crossed his mind of a letter of thanks from the President, and of the vote of a sword by Congress.  Alas for such hopes!  Commodore Paulding was clearly not a politician; he did not know that black meant white and white meant black,—­nor that the present of a filibuster, which he sent to the President, was the present of something worse than an elephant.  It was the present of a herd of elephants,—­of a sea of troubles.  Mr. Buchanan’s fine