But considering that the government itself said in dispatch No. 70, September 25, 1869, “The President does not deny, on the contrary he maintains, that every sovereign power decides for itself on its responsibility whether or not it will, at a given time, accord the status of belligerency,” etc., it was hardly worth while to use italics about Mr. Motley’s employment of the same language as constituting a grave cause of offence.

2.  Mr. Motley’s expression, “as being the fountain head of the disasters,” is a conversational paraphrase of the words of his instructions, “as it shows the beginning and the animus of that course of conduct which resulted so disastrously,” which is not “in precise conformity” with his instructions, but is just such a variation as is to be expected when one is talking with another and using the words that suggest themselves at the moment, just as the familiar expression, “hung up on a peg,” probably suggested itself to Lord Clarendon.

3.  “The fruits of the proclamation” is so inconsiderable a variation on the text of the instructions, “supplemented by acts causing direct damage,” that the secretary’s hint about want of precise conformity seems hardly to have been called for.

It is important to notice this point in the instructions:  With other powers Mr. Motley was to take the position that the “recognition of the insurgents’ state of war” was made “no ground of complaint;” with Great Britain that the cause of grievance was “not so much” placed upon the issuance of this recognition as upon her conduct under, and subsequent to, such recognition.

There is no need of maintaining the exact fitness of every expression used by Mr. Motley.  But any candid person who will carefully read the government’s dispatch No. 70, dated September 25, 1869, will see that a government holding such language could find nothing in Mr. Motley’s expressions in a conversation held at his first official interview to visit with official capital punishment more than a year afterwards.  If Mr. Motley had, as it was pretended, followed Sumner, Mr. Fish had “out-Sumnered” the Senator himself.

Mr. Davis’s pamphlet would hardly be complete without a mysterious letter from an unnamed writer, whether a faithless friend, a disguised enemy, a secret emissary, or an injudicious alarmist, we have no means of judging for ourselves.  The minister appears to have been watched by somebody in London, as he was in Vienna.  This somebody wrote a private letter in which he expressed “fear and regret that Mr. Motley’s bearing in his social intercourse was throwing obstacles in the way of a future settlement.”  The charge as mentioned in Mr. Davis’s letter is hardly entitled to our attention.  Mr. Sumner considered it the work of an enemy, and the recollection of the M’Crackin letter might well have made the government cautious of listening to complaints of such a character.  This Somebody may have been