“We have not been misled,” he says, “by any of the semblances of impartiality or of neutrality which unfriendly proceedings towards us in a perilous strife have put on. When any Government shall incline to a new and more unfriendly attitude, we shall then revise with care our existing relations towards that Power, and shall act in the emergency as becomes a people who have never yet faltered in their duty to themselves while they were endeavouring to improve the condition of the human race.” Compared with these prophecies the ravings of Mother Shipton become respectable oracles. Yet on them was founded the entire foreign policy of the Federal Government; the complaints that foreign statesmen and other sane persons would not confide in them were incessant; and they were the lights by which American envoys were expected to steer. These gentlemen, with more or less sense and discretion, all write in the stilted creaking style, stuck over with hard metaphors, which distinguishes the master-spirit Seward, and which appears to be the characteristic of American public compositions. They seem to have caught, and to express very honestly, not only his style but his ideas, and to represent perfectly the querulous, arrogant, exacting tone of the Secretary. It is not, probably, from a wish to do him homage that they thus accurately reflect him, but rather because it is natural to American politicians to take abroad with them that idea of the pre-eminence of their country which they have passed their lives at home in asserting, and because their habit of regarding England as the abode of a jealous aristocracy, and as being always in the wrong, places them in a position of natural antagonism to us in every case that can arise. But, granting this to be inevitable, we may consider ourselves very fortunate that America is represented among us by a gentleman in every way so entitled to respect as Mr Adams. The son of one President and the grandson of another, both of whom were elected to the chief place in the Republic at a time when something else besides obscurity and the absence of any quality which could excite the jealousy of aspiring men, was demanded for the attainment of the position which Washington had filled, the claims of Mr Adams as a public man evidently rest on other grounds than those of ordinary American politicians. We do not doubt that the expressions of goodwill and courtesy addressed to him from our Foreign Office are perfectly sincere and deserved. It is true that the tone of his correspondence with that office is often captious, and his demands are sometimes unreasonable. Without prompting from his own Government he seems often to prejudge questions of international law with a bias that blinds him to the true bearing of the question, as in the case of the Emily St Pierre, and leads him to treat as an injury the denial of concessions which are denied because impossible to be granted. But this