for the suppression of the rebellion
was palsied at the start. The insurrection of the Netherlands alone
has some very small similarity with our civil war; however, that
insurrection took place at a time when very few, if any, principles
of international laws were generally laid down and generally
recognized. Here the municipal laws, the right of the sovereign and
his duty to save itself and the people, the rights and the laws of
war, wrongly applied to such virtual outlaws as the rebels, the
maritime code of prize laws and rules, play into and intertwine each
other. When Mr. Seward penned his doleful proclamation of the
blockade, etc., he never had before his mind what a mess he
generated; what complications might arise therefrom. I am sure he
never knew that such proclamation was _a priori_ pregnant with
complications, and that at least its wording ought to have been very
careful. Mr. Seward was not at all cognizant of the fact that the
wording of a proclamation of a blockade, for the time being, lays
down a rule for the judges in the prize courts. For him it was
rather a declamation than a proclamation; he who believed the
rebellion would end in July, 1861, and that no occasion would arise
to apply the rules of the blockade.

Thus Mr. Seward, with his thorough knowledge of international law
rendered difficult the position of the captors; he equally increased
the difficulty for the judge to administer justice. By this
proclamation and the commentaries put on it, Mr. Seward curtailed
the rights of the government of which he is a part, conceded undue
conditions to the rebels, and facilitated to the neutrals the means
of violating his blockade. So much is clear and palpable to-day, and
I am sure more complications and imbecilities are in store. If Mr.
Seward had had good advisors for these nice and difficult questions,
he would not have blundered in this way. Thus Charles Eames, who in
the pleadings before the Superior United States Court has shown a
consummate mastery in prize questions--Eames could teach Mr. Seward
a great deal about the constitutional powers of the president to
suppress the rebellion, and about the meaning and the bearing of
international maritime laws, rights, duties and rules.

_February 20._--A Mr. Funk, a member of the Illinois Senate, a
farmer, and a man of sixty-five years, on February 13, made a speech
in that body which sounds better than all the rhetories and
oratories. It was the sound a