This passage shows that the writer had in mind something very different from the speech he criticized. Mr. Sumner nowhere alludes to Mr. Seward’s despatch, much less does he invoke the sympathies of Continental Europe for its doctrines. Nor does he pledge the authority of M. Hautefeuille in support of the pretension to treat the Rebel agents as contraband of war; on the contrary, he mentioned M. Hautefeuille as having “entered into this debate with a direct proposition for the release of the emissaries as a testimony to the true interpretation of International Law,”[118] and himself insists upon the very doctrine of the French publicist. Plainly, therefore, the writer dealt hard words at Mr. Sumner, mistaking him for somebody else. Then comes another misapprehension. “I know not whether, in the hazy muddle of a confused intelligence, Mr. Sumner has figured to himself that the seizure of Messrs. Slidell and Mason is a parallel case to the instances of impressment of seamen out of which grew the war of 1812. Yet men of less pretensions than the ‘Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations’ ought to be aware that the cases are not only not the same, but not even similar. Their resemblance, at most, extends to the proverbial identity of chalk and cheese.” Evidently the writer had not read the opinion of the law officers, individualizing the point, that “from on board a merchant ship of a neutral power, pursuing a lawful and innocent voyage, certain individuals have been taken by force,”[119] which was the precise point so often urged by the United States against impressment. Then follow the general condemnation and counterblast. “It is impossible to read such performances as the ‘Great Speech of the Hon. C. Sumner’ without drawing a gloomy augury for the future of a nation among whom such a man can occupy a chief place. In all the symptoms of decadence which the recent history of the American Republic exhibits, there is none more conspicuous and apparently more irreparable than the decline in capacity and character of her public men. The men bred under the shadow of the English colonial system were of a very different stamp from the race which progressive Democracy has spawned for itself.… “But now, whether we turn to the puerile absurdities of President Lincoln’s message, or to the confused and transparent sophistry of Mr. Seward’s despatch, or to the feeble and illogical malice of Mr. Sumner’s oration, we see nothing on every side but a melancholy spectacle of impotent violence and furious incapacity.”