With so much to call for his care in the field, President Lincoln was not less busy in the Cabinet. The relations of the Federal Government with Europe were of great importance. “The rebels,” says Arnold, with truth, “had a positive, vigorous organisation, with agents all over Europe, many of them in the diplomatic service of the United States.” They were well selected, and they were successful in creating the impression that the Confederacy was eminently “a gentleman’s government”--that the Federal represented an agrarian mob led by demagogues--that Mr. Lincoln was a vulgar, ignorant boor--and that the war itself was simply an unconstitutional attempt to force certain states to remain under a tyrannical and repulsive rule. The great fact that the South had, in the most public manner, proclaimed that it seceded _because the North would not permit the further extension of slavery_, was utterly ignored; and the active interference of the North with slavery was ostentatiously urged as a grievance, though, by a strange inconsistency, it was deemed expedient by many foreign anti-slavery men to withdraw all sympathy for the Federal cause, on the ground that its leaders manifested no eagerness to set the slaves free until it became a matter of military expediency. Thus the humane wisdom and moderation, which inspired Lincoln and the true men of the Union to overcome the dreadful obstacles which existed in the opposition of the Northern democrats to Emancipation, was most sophistically and cruelly turned against them. To a more cynical class, the war was but the cleaning by fire of a filthy chimney which should have been burnt out long before, and its Iliad in a nutshell amounted to a squabble which concerned nobody save as a matter for amusement. And there were, finally, not a few--to judge from the frank avowal of a journal of the highest class--who looked forward with joy to the breaking up of the American Union, because “their sympathies were with men, not with monsters, and Russia and the United States are simply giants among nations.” All this bore, in due time, its natural fruit. Whether people were to blame for this want of sympathy, considering the ingenuity with which Southern agents fulfilled their missions, is another matter. Time, which is, happily, every day modifying old feelings, cannot change truths. And it cannot be denied that hostilities had hardly begun, and that only half the Slave States were in insurrection, when the English and French Governments, acting in concert, recognised the government at Montgomery as an established belligerent power. As to this recognition, Mr. Charles F. Adams, the United States Minister to England, was instructed by Mr. Seward to the effect that it, if carried out, must at once suspend all friendly relations between the United States and England. When, on June 15th, the English and French ministers applied to Mr. Seward for leave to communicate to him their