personal solitude and political isolation of his position when the responsibility of his great office rested newly upon him. Under all these circumstances, if this lonely man moved slowly and cautiously during the early weeks of his administration, it was not at his door that the people had the right to lay the reproach of weakness or hesitation. Mr. Buchanan, for the convenience of his successor, had called an extra session of the Senate, and on March 5 President Lincoln sent in the nominations for his cabinet. All were immediately confirmed, as follows:-- William H. Seward, New York, secretary of state. Salmon P. Chase, Ohio, secretary of the treasury. Simon Cameron, Pennsylvania, secretary of war. Gideon Welles, Connecticut, secretary of the navy. Caleb B. Smith, Indiana, secretary of the interior. Edward Bates, Missouri, attorney-general. Montgomery Blair, Maryland, postmaster-general. It is matter of course that a cabinet slate should fail to give general satisfaction; and this one encountered fully the average measure of criticism. The body certainly was somewhat heterogeneous in its composition, yet the same was true of the Republican party which it represented. Nor was it by any means so heterogeneous as Mr. Lincoln had designed to have it, for he had made efforts to place in it a Southern spokesman for Southern views; and he had not desisted from the purpose until its futility was made apparent by the direct refusal of Mr. Gilmer of North Carolina, and by indications of a like unwillingness on the part of one or two other Southerners who were distantly sounded on the subject. Seward, Chase, Bates, and Cameron were the four men who had manifested the greatest popularity, after Lincoln, in the national convention, and the selection of them, therefore, showed that Mr. Lincoln was seeking strength rather than amity in his cabinet; for it was certainly true that each one of them had a following which was far from being wholly in sympathy with the following of any one of the others. The President evidently believed that it was of more importance that each great body of Northern men should feel that its opinions were fairly presented, than that his cabinet officers should always comfortably unite in looking at questions from one and the same point of view. Judge Davis says that Lincoln's original design was to appoint Democrats and Republicans alike to office. He carried this theory so far that the radical Republicans regarded the make-up of the cabinet as a "disgraceful surrender to the South;" while men of less extreme views saw with some alarm that he had called to his advisory council four ex-Democrats and only three ex-Whigs, a criticism which he met by saying that he himself was an "old-line Whig" and should be there to make the parties even. On the other hand, the Republicans of the middle line of States grumbled much at the selection of Bates and Blair as representatives of their section.