not virtually betrayed into its hands or seized in breach of trust.  It commands not a single port on the coast, nor any highway out from its pretended capital by land.  Under these circumstances, Great Britain is called upon to intervene, and give it body and independence by resisting our measures of suppression.  British recognition would be British intervention to create within our own territory a hostile state by overthrowing this republic itself.”  In Mr. Seward’s draft a menacing sentence followed these words, but Mr. Lincoln drew his pen through it.

Mr. Adams was to say that the treatment of insurgent privateers was “a question exclusively our own,” and that we intended to treat them as pirates.[169] If Great Britain should recognize them as lawful belligerents and give them shelter, “the laws of nations afford an adequate and proper remedy;”—­“and we shall avail ourselves of it,” added Mr. Seward; but again Mr. Lincoln’s prudent pen went through these words of provocation.

Finally Mr. Adams was instructed to offer the adhesion of the United States to the famous Declaration of the Congress of Paris, of 1856, which concerned sundry matters of neutrality.

The letter ended with two paragraphs of that patriotic rodomontade which seems eminently adapted to domestic consumption in the United States, but which, if it ever came beneath the eye of the British minister, probably produced an effect very different from that which was aimed at.  Mr. Lincoln had the good taste to write on the margin:  “Drop all from this line to the end;” but later he was induced to permit the nonsense to stand, since it was really harmless.

The amendments made by the President in point of quantity were trifling, but in respect of importance were very great.  All that he did was here and there to change or to omit a phrase, which established no position, but which in the strained state of feeling might have had serious results.  The condition calls to mind the description of the summit of the Alleghany Ridge, where the impulses given by almost imperceptible inequalities in the surface of the rock have for their ultimate result the dispatching of mighty rivers either through the Atlantic slope to the ocean, or down the Mississippi valley to the Gulf of Mexico.  A few adjectives, two or three ever so little sentences, in this dispatch, might have led to peace or to war; and peace or war with England almost surely meant, respectively, Union or Disunion in the United States.  In fact, no more important state paper was issued by Mr. Seward.  It established our relations with Great Britain, and by consequence also with France and with the rest of Europe, during the whole period of the civil war.  Its positions, moderate in themselves, and resolutely laid down, were never materially departed from.  The English minister did not afterward give either official or unofficial audiences to accredited rebel emissaries; the blockade was maintained by a force