it is not his fault.  No one could blame Captain Wilkes for acting policeman on the seas.  But who ever before heard of giving a man glory for achievements so little glorious?  How Captain Wilkes must have blushed when those speeches were made to him, when that talk about the sword came up, when the thanks arrived to him from Congress!  An officer receives his country’s thanks when he has been in great peril, and has borne himself gallantly through his danger; when he has endured the brunt of war, and come through it with victory; when he has exposed himself on behalf of his country and singed his epaulets with an enemy’s fire.  Captain Wilkes tapped a merchantman on the shoulder in the high seas, and told him that his passengers were wanted.  In doing this he showed no lack of spirit, for it might be his duty; but where was his spirit when he submitted to be thanked for such work?

And then there arose a clamor of justification among the lawyers; judges and ex-judges flew to Wheaton, Phillimore, and Lord Stowell.  Before twenty-four hours were over, every man and every woman in Boston were armed with precedents.  Then there was the burning of the “Caroline.”  England had improperly burned the “Caroline” on Lake Erie, or rather in one of the American ports on Lake Erie, and had then begged pardon.  If the States had been wrong, they would beg pardon; but whether wrong or right, they would not give up Slidell and Mason.  But the lawyers soon waxed stronger.  The men were manifestly ambassadors, and as such contraband of war.  Wilkes was quite right, only he should have seized the vessel also.  He was quite right, for though Slidell and Mason might not be ambassadors, they were undoubtedly carrying dispatches.  In a few hours there began to be a doubt whether the men could be ambassadors, because if called ambassadors, then the power that sent the embassy must be presumed to be recognized.  That Captain Wilkes had taken no dispatches, was true; but the captain suggested a way out of this difficulty by declaring that he had regarded the two men themselves as an incarnated embodiment of dispatches.  At any rate, they were clearly contraband of war.  They were going to do an injury to the North.  It was pretty to hear the charming women of Boston, as they became learned in the law of nations:  “Wheaton is quite clear about it,” one young girl said to me.  It was the first I had ever heard of Wheaton, and so far was obliged to knock under.  All the world, ladies and lawyers, expressed the utmost confidence in the justice of the seizure; but it was clear that all the world was in a state of the profoundest nervous anxiety on the subject.  To me it seemed to be the most suicidal act that any party in a life-and-death struggle ever committed.  All Americans on both sides had felt, from the beginning of the war, that any assistance given by England to one or the other would turn the scale.  The government of Mr. Lincoln must have learned by this time that England