It Has Taught Those Who Have Not Been
Close Observers Of The American Struggle To Believe That, After All,
The Americans Are Indifferent As To Their Liberties.
Such pranks
have been played before high heaven by men utterly unfitted for the
use of great power, as have scared all the nations.
Mr. Lincoln,
the President by whom this unconstitutional act has been done,
apparently delegated his assumed authority to his minister, Mr.
Seward. Mr. Seward has reveled in the privilege of unrestrained
arrests, and has locked men up with reason and without. He has
instituted passports and surveillance; and placed himself at the
head of an omnipresent police system with all the gusto of a Fouche,
though luckily without a Fouche's craft or cunning. The time will
probably come when Mr. Seward must pay for this - not with his life
or liberty, but with his reputation and political name. But in the
mean time his lettres de cachet have run everywhere through the
States. The pranks which he played were absurd, and the arrests
which he made were grievous. After awhile, when it became manifest
that Mr. Seward had not found a way to success, when it was seen
that he had inaugurated no great mode of putting down rebellion, he
apparently lost his power in the cabinet. The arrests ceased, the
passports were discontinued, and the prison doors were gradually
opened. Mr. Seward was deposed, not from the cabinet, but from the
premiership of the cabinet. The suspension of the privilege of the
writ of habeas corpus was not countermanded, but the operation of
the suspension was allowed to become less and less onerous; and now,
in April, 1862, within a year of the commencement of the suspension,
it has, I think, nearly died out.
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