'5. He is everywhere cold--more willing to wound than bold to strike; and yet he fretfully commits himself before he gets through, in defence of slavery and extreme democratic positions. '6. He does not pretend that he was ever requested by the great author with whose productions he has taken such liberties to undertake the editorial duties. 'His language is so general that one needs to read it carefully to feel the full force of what I have said. 'In the preface (page 1-20), he speaks of 'Spanish American independence, now jeopardized by our _fratricidal_ contest'--fratricidal is indeed a favorite word; he uses it in an offensive sense as regards the United States. Page 99, note, he says of slavery, what is utterly untrue, that 'the Constitution recognized it as property, and pledges the Federal Government to protect it.' The noble act of June 19, 1862, forbidding slavery in United States Territories, he comments on in this wise: 'This act wholly ignores the decision of the Supreme Court (meaning the Dred Scott case) on the subject of slavery.' He then inserts the whole act in the note, only to hold it up to censure--'testing it by international law' as interpreted by him. At page 605 he denounces that law as 'obnoxious not only to the principles of international law, but to the Constitution of the United States.' His note and extracts, including long extracts from speeches of Thomas, of Massachusetts, and Crittenden, of Kentucky, fill more than twenty-two pages--reserving a line or two of text at the top. To say nothing of the sentiments, such notes are a shameful abuse of the reputation and work of Mr. Wheaton, and a perversion of the duties and rights of an editor. But a word of the sentiments. He exhausts himself and the records of the past in accumulating precedents to condemn the policy of freeing slaves as a war measure, or of arming them in the nation's defence.