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 a practical exclusion of the United States from the benefits of the Treaty of Paris, certainly involved something of indignity; but in this the country had no actual _rights_; and to speak frankly, since she had refused to come in when invited, she could hardly complain of an inhospitable reception when, under the influence of immediate and stringent self-interest, her diplomatists saw fit to change their course. So, on the whole, it is not to be denied that delicate and novel business in the untried department of foreign diplomacy was managed with great skill, under trying circumstances. A few months later, in his message to Congress, at the beginning of December, 1861, the President referred to our foreign relations in the following paragraphs:--