ion 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 so competent
that the British government acquiesced in it; no recognition of the
Confederacy was ever made, either in the ways prohibited or in any way
whatsoever; it is true that bitter controversies arose concerning
Confederate privateers, and to some extent England failed to meet our
position in this matter; but it was rather the application of our rule
than the rule itself which was in dispute; and she afterward, under the
Geneva award, made full payment for her derelictions. The behavior and
the proposal of terms, which constituted