W. H. Seward.
Although the report is not confirmed that Seward is to be sent on a foreign mission, that day of honorable banishment may not be far distant. We have no doubt he is anxious to hide his head in some foreign land, and escape the tempest which will ere long be howling over the North for the author of the war. He is the man, he, Wm. H. Seward, pre- eminently the man who fired ‘"the Ephesian dome"’ of the old American Union, and whose name will be immortal in the hate and execration of his countrymen. There were causes at work in the antagonistic institutions, interests, and habits of the people, which rendered ultimate dissolution evitable; but, if there had been no such man as Wm. H. Seward, this generation at least might have died in its bed in peace. A hundred and fifty thousand of Seward's countrymen, whose bones now bleach the soil they came to desecrate, might be dwelling in contented homes, and hundreds of thousands more, whom he is training for the same internal purposes, might have lived to a good old age. He organized purely for the purposes of his own election the political Abolition party which brought the old Union to destruction. No other man in the North possessed the peculiar combination of intellectual and moral qualities necessary for that purpose. It is true he failed in obtaining the first nomination of his party for the Presidency, but, as Secretary of State, he was the actual, if not the nominal President, and he was sure of being Lincoln's successor till ‘"wicked rebellion"’ assumed its gigantic proportions, rendering the subjugation of the South necessary to the preservation of that glorious Union--that is, the election of Wm. H. Seward to the next Presidency of the United States.When American school boys used to read in history of bloody tyrants in ancient times and even in modern Europe who remorselessly sacrificed the lives of their helpless subjects in mere wars of ambition, such beings seemed to be monsters belonging to a fabulous period, whose character it was scarcely possible to believe in. What boy or man on all this continent twenty years ago suspected that among the aspirants for American favor, in a row of Senators whose diminutive forms were lost in the gigantic shadows of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster, sat a man who was to play in the political Paradise of the new world the part of Satan in Eden; a man whose lust of power and place would hurl a towering Republic to the dust, and convert its finest fields into a Golgotha.--Yet, we have lived to see this miracle of Diabolism, and to realize that no form of quarrel can purify human nature or preserve the people from those calamities, inevitable as plagues and pestilences, in which the selfish and unprincipled ambition of the few may involve the innocent and unoffending many.
In what country the Premier of Lincoln will ultimately find his anticipated exile, we know not; but his infamy is as wide as the earth, and he can visit no spot on this planet where he is not already known and despised. There is no civilized court in which, whatever the outward forms of respect to an ambassador, there will not be a secret contempt for the most mendacious and hypocritical public man of this century, and for the impostor who promised so often that the rebellion should be put down in sixty and ninety days. The reputation of Arnold and Burr, in future ages, will be fragrant and glorious compared with that of Wm. H. Seward.
