At this time two objects are diligently prosecuted by the high-minded Seward, always on the highest grounds. The one is the task of convincing the British Government that it has fallen into a grave error in acknowledging the South as a belligerent, and warning it against receiving the “missionaries of the insurgents,” as he terms the commissioners of the Southern Confederacy. “The cause of the North,” he says, “involves the independence of nations and the right of human nature.” “We feel free to assume that it is the general conviction of men, not only here, but in all other countries, that this Federal Union affords a better system than any other that could be contrived to assure the safety, the peace, the prosperity, the welfare, and the happiness of all the States of which it is composed.” “It is a war,” he says elsewhere, “against human nature;” and again, “The wit of man fails to suggest, not merely a better political system, having the same objects as the present Union, but even any possible substitute for it.” And on the 21st July, “I cannot leave the subject without endeavouring once more, as I have so often done before, to induce the British Government to realise the conviction which I have more than once expressed in this correspondence, that the policy of the Government is one that is based on interests of the greatest importance and sentiments of the highest virtue, and therefore is in no case likely to be changed, whatever may be the varying fortunes of the war at home, or the action of foreign nations on this subject, while the policy of foreign States rests on ephemeral interests of commerce or ambition.” “Sure we are that the transaction now going on in our country involves the progress of civilisation and humanity, and equally sure that our attitude in it is right, and no less sure that our press and our statesmen are equal in ability and influence to any in Europe.” Manifestly, to countenance any power hostile to so beneficent a system would be almost as bad as to acknowledge Satan and the rebel angels as belligerents. But lest “the cupidity and caprice of Great Britain,” to which, he says, the disunionists will appeal, should render her blind to such high considerations, he takes a lower ground with her, and delivers, May 21, 1861, the following ominous and prophetic warning:— “Great Britain has but to wait _a few months_, and all her present inconveniences will cease with our own troubles. If she take a different course, she will calculate for herself the ultimate as well as the immediate consequences, and will consider what position she will hold when she shall have for ever lost the sympathies and affections of the only nation on whose sympathies and affections she has a natural claim.”