a statesman. Mr. Seward
must lose credit at home and abroad for having prophesied, and having
his prophecies end in smoke. When Hatteras was taken (Gen. Scott
protested against the expedition), Mr. S. assured me that it was the
beginning of the end. A diplomat here made the observation that no
minister of a European parliamentary government could remain in power
after having been continually contradicted by facts.

Now, Mr. Seward devised these collateral missions to Europe. He very
little knows the habit and temper of European cabinets if he believes
that such collateral confidential agents can do any good. The European
cabinets distrust such irresponsible agents, who, in their turn,
weaken the influence and the standing of the genuine diplomatic
agents. Mr. S., early in the year, boasted to abolish, even in Europe,
the system of passports, and soon afterwards introduced it at home. So
his imagination carries him to overhaul the world. He proposes to
European powers a united expedition to Japan, and we cannot prevent at
home the running of the blockade, and are ourselves blockaded on the
Potomac. All such schemes are offsprings of an ambitious imagination.
But the worst is, that every such outburst of his imagination Mr.
Seward at once transforms into a dogma, and spreads it with all his
might. I pity him when I look towards the end of his political career.
He writes well, and has put down the insolent English dispatch
concerning the _habeas corpus_ and the arrests of dubious, if not
treacherous, Englishmen. Perhaps Seward imagines himself to be a
Cardinal Richelieu, with Lincoln for Louis XIII. (provided he knows as
much history), or may be he has the ambition to be considered a
Talleyrand or Metternich of diplomacy. But if any, he has some very,
very faint similarity with Alberoni. He easily outwits here men around
him; most are politicians as he; but he never can outwit the statesmen
of Europe. Besides, diplomacy, above all that of great powers, is
conceived largely and carried on a grand scale; the present diplomacy
has outgrown what is commonly called (but fallaciously) Talleyrandism
and Metternichism.

McClellan and the party which fears to make a bold advance on the
enemy make so much fuss about the country being cut up and wooded; it
proves only that they have no brains and no fertility of expedients.
This country is not more cut up than is the Caucasus, and the woods
are no great, endless, primitive forests