Mr. Seward after thus quoting, continues:--
"If I decide this case in favor of my own Government, I must disavow its most cherished principles, and reverse, and forever abandon its essential policy. The country cannot afford the sacrifice. If I maintain these principles, and adhere to that policy, I must surrender the case itself. It will be seen, therefore, that this Government could not deny the justice of the claim presented to us, in this respect, upon its merits. We are asked to do to the British nation, just what we have always insisted, all nations ought to do to us."
That is "coming down with the corn," now, handsomely, but in view of the antecedents of the question, and of the "seven days'" pressure under which Mr. Seward's despatch was written, one cannot help pitying Mr. Seward. We not only pity him, but he absolutely surprises us by the fertility of his imagination, in discovering any resemblance between the Madison precedent, and the case he had in hand. The British Government was not insisting that Mr. Seward should send the _Trent_ in for adjudication. It did not mean that there should be any adjudication about the matter, except such as it had itself already passed upon the case. Had it not said to its minister, at Washington, "If, at the end of that time, no answer is given, or, _if any other answer_ is given, _except that of a compliance with the demands of her Majesty's Government_, your lordship is instructed to leave Washington, &c."? To be logical, Mr. Seward should have said, "Our officer having made a mistake, by doing a right thing, in a wrong way, namely, by seizing contraband of war, on board a neutral ship, without sending the ship in, for adjudication, we will send the prisoners back to the _Trent_, if you will send the _Trent_ into one of our ports for adjudication." But Mr. Seward knew better than to say any such thing, for the simple reason, that this was not the thing which was demanded of him, although he had written a lengthy despatch to prove that it was.
I was in Europe when Mr. Seward's despatch arrived there. Every one was astonished, both at the paper, and the act of humiliation performed by it. The act needed not to be humiliating. A great wrong had been done a neutral. It could be neither justified, nor palliated. A _statesman_, at the head of the Federal State Department, would have made haste to atone for it, before any demand for reparation could be made. To pander to a vitiated public taste, and gain a little temporary _eclat_, by appearing to beard the British lion, hoping that the lion would submit, in silence to the indignity, Mr. Seward committed one of those blunders which was equivalent to a great crime, since it humiliated an entire people, and put on record against them one of those damaging pages that historians cannot, if they would, forget. The following were the closing lines of this famous despatch:--