previous next


Seward Baffled.

--We published yesterday the correspondence between Seward and his man Dayton, or rather the instructions of the former, reciting the contents of a letter received from the latter. The French Government refuses, absolutely, to make itself an accomplice of Seward in the wretched knavery he attempted to practice, If he had not been entirely destitute of all delicacy, instinct would have taught him that such would be the issue. The French Emperor, if some people object to his system of government, is yet a gentleman, and no man could be a gentleman and not despise the meanness of Seward from the very bottom of his heart. The United States, only four years ago, positively refused to accede to the treaty of Paris, expressly on the ground that its mercantile marine was large while its navy was small, and that in the event of a war with any of the high contracting parties, the United States could depend upon nothing so much as its privateers. It never would have entered Seward's head to make the present proposition had the Union continued intact. If war should take place with England tomorrow, the principal dependence of the United States would be upon its privateers. Such being the facts of the case, the attempt to make the French Government assist him in fixing the stigma of piracy upon us was a despicable trick, especially worthy of the man and the cause. It was full blooded Yankeeism all over. As long as privateering was useful they stuck to it;now it makes against them they wish to punish others for an of fence which they themselves had first claimed the right to be guilty of. The instincts of a gentleman forbade the Emperor to listen to such a proposal.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
United States (United States) (3)
hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Seward (3)
Dayton (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: