Thus, within six weeks succeeding his entrance into the chambers of State, Mr. Seward had mapped out in his own brain a much more comprehensive policy than he had even laboriously and ably outlined upon paper.  He had placed himself in magnetico-diplomatic communication with the great courts of Europe; surrounded by place-seekers, dogged by reporters, and paragraphed at by a thousand newspapers, from ‘Fundy’ to ‘Dolores.’  And the most remarkable rhetorical feature of these many dispatches is the absence of iteration, notwithstanding they were written upon substantially one text.  It is characteristic of them, as of his speeches, that no one interlaces the other; each is complete of itself.  Mr. Seward has always possessed that varied fecundity of expression for which Mr. Webster was admired.  A gentleman who accompanied him upon his Lincoln-election tour from Auburn to Kansas, remarked, that listening to and recalling all the bye-play, depot speeches, and more elaborate addresses uttered by Mr. Seward during the campaign, he never heard him repeat upon himself, nor even speak twice in the same groove of thought.  Neither will any reader discover throughout even these early dispatches a marked haste of thought, or a slovenly word-link in the Saxon rhetoric.

So far, we have alluded only to the instructions prepared before plenipotentiary departure.  But the executive axe in the block of foreign affairs having been scoured, and new faces having fully replaced the decapitated heads in foreign diplomatic baskets, circulars, instructions and dispatches daily accumulate, ‘treading on each other’s heels.’  The volume contains one hundred and forty emanations from the pen of Secretary Seward.  How many more there exist is only known to the Cabinet or the exigencies of secret service.  Is not the bare arithmetical announcement sufficient to satisfy the inquirer into Mr. Seward’s diplomatic assiduity?  If not, will he please to remember as well Mr. Seward’s perusals of foreign mails, cabinet meetings, consultation of archives or state papers or precedents, examinations into the relation of domestic events to foreign policy, and the inspection of the sands of peace or war in the respective hour-glasses of his department?

The circulars of Secretaries Black and Seward are promptly answered by Mr. Dallas about a month after the inauguration, and whilst awaiting the arrival of Charles Francis Adams.  He said, among other things, ’English opinion tends rather, I apprehend, to the theory that a peaceful separation may work beneficially for both groups of States, and not injuriously affect the rest of the world.  The English can not be expected to appreciate the weakness, discredit, complications and dangers which we instinctively and justly ascribe to disunion.’