“I am constrained to congratulate you upon making the Thursday speech on the Trent affair. It has fallen on the community with the most happy effect. It was most timely and salutary, and most certainly the great speech of the session in a higher than a rhetorical sense. It will have a most wide and extended influence: first, to pacificate the public sentiment in this country, and also in England; and then to conciliate European powers, by acceding to the policy and principles they urge upon us; and, finally, by clinching England to the construction of International Law for which we have always contended, and thus driving her from her offensive pretensions pertinaciously adhered to for a century. The speech is applauded on all sides, even by those who do not love our party or you any too well.… The peroration is particularly splendid, argumentative, eloquent, and wise. I repeat, that all sorts of people applaud it, and it is believed that you have done more to put down our Rebellion by your action in the Senate on Thursday than all the major-generals have done in the last six months.” Joseph Lyman, an early friend and college classmate, wrote from Jamaica Plain, near Boston:-- “You cannot think how much I was delighted with your Trent speech. I say nothing of it critically, but that the statements were truly admirable; and you know very well, that, when a case is well stated, it is more than argued, it is adjudged. But this is not why I was so much pleased with it. It was because it was so thoroughly in your best line and manner. It showed you to the public as I want to show you,--as a truly _practical man_. I know as well as you the absurdity of those who call Antislavery a party of one idea, of abstraction and transcendentalism, &c.,--as if the one idea of Humanity did not absorb all others of practical legislation.” Rev. Samuel M. Emery, of the Episcopal Church, and a college classmate, wrote from Portland, Connecticut:-- “It is rather late in the day to congratulate you upon the lofty position you have reached on the round of fame and usefulness, but not too late to thank you for your exhaustive speech on the Trent affair. I, as well as thousands of Union-loving people, thank you for that speech.” William G. Snethen, Abolitionist and lawyer, wrote from Baltimore:--