already opened a passage for us into Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, it has been determined to-day to permit the restoration of trade upon our inland ways and waters under certain limitations and restrictions, which may continue until the pacification of the country shall take place.

March 8, 1862. You will have noticed our successful advance down the Mississippi and along its banks. Next week we shall ascertain the strength of the obstructions at Memphis. After passing that port the river will be entirely open to us to New Orleans. I suppose I hazard nothing of publicity here by informing you that General Butler with an adequate land force, and Captain Porter with a fleet, are already in motion to seize and hold New Orleans. The armies on the Potomac are also expected to try conclusions soon.

You will, I am sure, need no instructions to use this information in the way best calculated to free our unhappy domestic strife from its European elements of mischief. When that shall be done, all will be well.

I learn that the insurgents have withdrawn from their front on the Potomac, above and below this city, and are breaking up their camps and retreating before our army toward Richmond. Thus ends the siege of Washington, and thus advances the cause of the Union.

March 10, 1862. Attention has been directed to the extraordimary proceedings which are taking place in Mexico. We shall be just to ourselves, and at the same time shall practise the prudence that will avert any new complication in our affairs.

To-day the insurgent army is retreating from the position it has o long and so uselessly held in front of the capital. The war is etiring within the limits of the States which began it with reckess haste, and which have hitherto carried it on with intemperate eal, under the expectation that they would escape from the scourge I was inflicting upon States less disloyal than themselves.

March 15, 1862. Since the date of my last despatch the Union orces have gained decided advantages. The financial and moral s well as the physical elements of the insurrection seem to be pidly approaching exhaustion. Now, when we so clearly see how uch of its strength was derived from the hope of foreign aid, we -e brought to lament anew the precipitancy with which foreign owers so unnecessarily conceded to it belligerent rights.

March 17, 1862. The occupation of so many of the Souther ports having been effected by our forces, and all of the others beir now effectually invested, I apprehend that the illicit traffic which has been so flagrantly carried on from British ports will come t an end.

March 25, 1862. The events of the week have been strik ́-and significant: the capture of Newbern by Burnside, with t consequent evacuation of Beaufort and Fort Macon by the insegents, and the destruction by themselves of their own pirti. steamer Nashville; the rout of the insurgents, on their retreat fr Winchester to Strasburg, by Shields; the victory of General Po at New Madrid; and the bombardment of Island No. 10, in the Mi sissippi, by Commodore Foote.

A movement of the main army of the Potomac down the river to Fortress Monroe is qui-tly going on, and demonstrations w: soon be made against Norfolk and Richmond.

We suppose our oce in expedition against New Orleans must, a this time, have reached the mouth of the Mississippi.

March 26, 1862.—We have already, with a strong hand, LTered the control of n ar'y all of the cost of the insurrectio a“ States, and we have recaptured four of the great ports whie's w wrested from us by the insurgents, or betrayed into t'. ir 1. before the government assumed i's attitude of s-'f defen e. W d ang this We have effected a release of all our land ari forces from the sieges in with thy were held by the ribs these forces are, as is supped, safely acting agressiv 1. mens are amp'e, our fore s namerons, our credit & mud, sp. t buwant and brave. T » reverse of all t' is is the digon of the insurgents, T..y are redued fren agg

r.

the insurgents with the more southern States; that a third army, under General Halleck, equal in numbers and efficiency with that of the Potomac, is descending both banks of the Mississippi, flanking what has hitherto proved to be an irresistible naval force, which is making its way upon the river itself to New Orleans; while a fourth column of land and naval forces, under General Butler and Captain Porter, deemed adequate to any emergency, is already believed to be ascending the river from the Belize to attack New Orleans. Burnside has really left nothing to be done to rescue the ports between Norfolk and Charleston. Charleston cannot long hold out; and the fall of Savannah is understood to be only a question of days, not of weeks. Mobile cannot stand after the fall of these and of New Orleans, and all the ports between those cities are already in our possession.

April 1, 1862.- Earl Russell, in the House of Lords, expressed the belief that this country is large enough for two independent nations, and the hope that this government will assent to a peaceful separation from the insurrectionary States. A very brief sojourn among us, with an observation of our mountains, rivers, and coasts, and some study of our social condition and habits, would be sufficient to satisfy him, on the contrary, that the country is not too large for one such people as this, and that it is, and must always be, too small for two distinct nations, until the people shall have become so demoralized by faction that they are ready to enter the course which leads through continued subdivision to continued anarchy. All the British speculations assume that the political elements which have been brought into antagonism here are equal in vigor and endurance. Nothing, however, is more certain than that freedom and slavery are very unequal in these qualities, and that when these diverse elements are eliminated, the former from the cause of sedition, and the latter from the cause of the government, then the government must prevail, sustained as it is by the coöperating sentiments of loyalty, of national pride, interest, ambition, and the permanent love of peace.

April 3, 1862. The late achievement of the Merrimack in Hampton Roads at first perplexed and alarmed all our naval agents and officers. They have, however, made preparations for her coming out again, and they express entire confidence in their ability to master her. Meantime the blockade is actually becoming a siege,

which we trust will soon result in occupation of the insurrectionary ports.

April 8, 1862.- Our armies, held everywhere in the leash, are at the point of being let loose. Important transactions must occur within a few days. It is the part of wisdom to be neither sanguine of success nor disturbed with apprehensions of failure. If the tide of military success shall continue to flow full and strong, we can consent to wait the reluctant but inevitable return of maritime nations to the fraternal positions they abandoned when faction undertook to undermine their fidelity as the most effectual way to compass our destruction.

I have just signed, with Lord Lyons, a treaty which I trust will be approved by the Senate and by the British government. If ratified, it will bring the African slave-trade to an end immediately and forever. Had such a treaty been made in 1808, there would now have been no sedition here, and no disagreement between the United States and foreign nations. We are indeed suffering deeply in this civil war. Europe has impatiently condemned and deplored it. Yet it is easy to see already that the calamity will be compensated by incalculable benefits to our country and to mankind. Such are the compensations of Providence for the sacrifices it exacts.

April 14, 1862. It is known that all the free States are loyal to the Union; that the insurrection had its spring in the slave States, and that it aims to separate them all from the Union, and embrace them in a new sovereign confederacy. There is not one regiment or battalion, or even company of men, which was organized in, or derived from, the free States and Territories, in arms anywhere against the Union. Some regiments derived from the border slave States are found in the slave States in hostilities against the Federal authorities, while others equally or more numer ous are supporting them there. Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, ali border slave States, respectively, have contributed large bodies of men to the armies of the Union. Missouri, a border slave State west of the Mississippi, has been cleared of all organ ized military bodies of insurgents, and for some time past has ceased to be troubled by guerillas. The battle of Pea Ridge, in which General Curtis beat Van Dorn, Price, McIntosh, and McCullough, has firmly established General Curtis and the national colors in the northwestern part of Arkansas, an interior slave State. No

insurrectionary forces remain in Kentucky, also a border slave State. All the fortified positions of the insurgents have been abandoned, and the southern border of Tennessee, an interior slave State, has been crossed by the advancing armies of the nation, which, after the victories of Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, the occupation of Bowling Green, Nashville, Murfreesborough, and Columbus, a few days since captured the fortified position of Island No. 10, in the Mississippi, with one hundred heavy guns, thirty pieces of field artillery, six thousand prisoners; and on the same day, after a two days' contest, repulsed and beat the insurgent army, said to be eighty thousand strong, at Pittsburg Landing, with the loss of their chief, General A. S. Johnston. Four days afterwards General Mitchell, with a column of the same Federal army, by a forced march, occupied, without loss, Huntsville, in the State of Alabama, one of the Gulf slave States, and captured some two hundred prisoners, fifteen locomotive engines, and many railroad carriages, which will be very useful in future operations. Immediately afterwards he captured Decatur and the Chattanooga Junction, and thus got possession of one hundred and ten miles of the railroad. This stroke is important, as it cuts off the great artery of connection by railroad between Memphis and Richmond and the southeastern slave States. Jacksonville, in Eastern Tennessee, has been visited by our forces, and thus it is seen that they are approaching Knoxville, the principal city in that always intensely loyal part of the State of Ten

nessee.

April 19, 1862.- All the grievances which disturb our people. and tend to alienate them from Great Britain seem deducible from the concessions made by her to the insurgents at the beginning of this civil war. All the explanations we receive from Great Britain seem to imply a conviction that this civil war must end in the overthrow of the Federal Union. The ultimate consequence of such a calamity would be that this great country would be divided into factions and hostile states and confederations, as Greece and Italy and Spanish America have been.

You can do no more in the present conjecture than to give his lordship, from time to time, fresh and accumulating evidence of our purpose and our ability to pursue to a successful end the course which we have learned from our British ancestry, namely, to hold the constituent States of our great realm in perpetual and indissol

uble union.