All this eloquence and logic has a double object—first, to avert the recognition of the South, followed by subsequent intervention; and, secondly, and chiefly, to induce the European Powers to retrace the step they had taken of acknowledging the South as a belligerent. The original protest against this step had been on the particular ground that the Government had taken it more hastily than was needful, and ought to have awaited the arrival of Mr Adams, charged with the reasons which the Federal Government might urge in protesting against it. As the measure was one of neutrality, it was manifestly proper that it should be adopted without hearing the arguments of one side only. However, the North considered itself injured, and expressed its sense of injury; but until we read these papers we had thought that the precipitation of the measure was the chief ground on which it was complained of. But so far from that being the case, the measure itself constitutes, down to the present time, the chief point of dispute. It is not going too far to say that, had the Federal Government accepted the position of neutrality of foreign Governments, and conducted its relations with them on that basis, the greater part of these despatches need never have been written. Nine-tenths of them are the result of looking at the same facts from two points of view—of looking at the war, on the one side, as a conflict between great sections, each possessed of power sufficient to maintain itself against the other, and to produce consequences highly important to neutrals; on the other side, as a domestic difficulty caused by a weak and failing faction, and which should not be noticed by foreign Powers any more than any other insignificant outbreak. Our Government saw in it the division of the Republic into portions, strongly defined by a territorial line, arming themselves for a conflict in which the balance of right was a subtle question open to opposite interpretations, but in which, it was evident, the Federal Government could never be victorious consistently with its own principles. The magnitude of the quarrel was such as powerfully to affect our own interests, and to render the probability imminent that the Queen’s subjects would be involved in the struggle, on the one side or the other, in such a manner as to compromise themselves, perhaps the Government. That the nature of the war was rightly estimated, events have more than sufficiently proved; that it was the first duty of the Government to protect its own subjects will probably be admitted by most moralists. But there is one moralist, Mr Seward, who thinks that the British Government, however bound to protect the interests of its own subjects, as it might be, he admits, in an inferior degree, is still more bound to consider the interests of the human race as involved in the maintenance of the Federal Union,—of the system, be it remembered, whose inevitable results have been to make a Lincoln the chief