12th of November last, by Lord Wharncliffe, and a copy of your answer to that letter.

Your proceeding in that matter is approved. You will now inform Lord Wharncliffe that permission for an agent of the committee described by him to visit the insurgents detained in military prisons of the United States, and to distribute among them seventeen thousand pounds of British gold, is disallowed. Here it is expected that your correspondence with Lord Wharncliffe will end.

That correspondence will necessarily become public. On reading it, the American people will be well aware that while the United States have ample means for the support of prisoners, as well as for every other exigency of the war in which they are engaged, the insurgents, who have blindly rushed into that condition, are suffering no privations that appeal for relief to charity either at home or abroad.

The American people will be likely to reflect that the sum thus insidiously tendered in the name of humanity constitutes no large portion of the profits which its contributors may be justly supposed to have derived from the insurgents, by exchanging with them arms and munitions of war for the coveted productions of immoral and enervating slave labor. Nor will any portion of the American people be disposed to regard the sum thus ostentatiously offered for the relief of captured insurgents as a too generous equivalent for the devastation and dissolution which a civil war, promoted and protracted by British subjects, has spread throughout States which before were eminently prosperous and happy.

Finally, in view of this last officious intervention in our domestic affairs, the American people can hardly fail to recall the warning of the Father of our Country, directed against two great and intimately connected public dangers, namely: sectional faction and foreign intrigue. I do not think the insurgents have become debased, although they have sadly wandered from the ways of loyalty and patrtiotisın. I think that, in common with all our countrymen, they will rejoice in being saved by their considerate and loyal Government from the grave insults which Lord Wharncliffe and his associates, in their zeal for the overthrow of the United States, have prepared for the victims of their unnatural and hopeless rebellion. I am, sir, your obedient servant,

WILLIAM H. SEWARD.

An attempt of Lord Warncliffe, through the London Times, to give a color of propriety to the action thus summarily

brought to an end, by referring to statements of some mendacious correspondent in this country-as utterly destitute of truth, as much of the correspondence of the London Times and other English journals concerning American affairs-Professor Goldwin Smith, of Oxford University, who had candidly observed and judged our people in this conflict from the first, and who had lately visited America, promptly met these allegations with the following reply:

TO THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY NEWS: Sir:-Lord Wharncliffe, in his letter published in the Times of yesterday, intimates on the faith of an American correspondent, whose letter he does not produce in full, and whose name he does not give, that the Confederate prisoners in the hands of the Federal Government are suffering unusual privations, and that a pile of them has been seen lying dead from want of nourishing food, and he accuses Mr. Seward, in effect, of excluding the agent of the Liverpool Southern Bazaar Fund from the prisons, lest by his testimony these cruelties should be brought to light.

In the course of the tour in the United States, from which I have just returned, I visited the prison at camp Douglas, near Chicago, and the Prisoner's Hospital at Baltimore. And I beg leave again to express the conviction, stated in my former letters, that the inmates of the prison were not suffering for want of nourishing food, or from any unusual privation; and that the inmates of the hospital were treated with the utmost liberality and kindness. I have among my papers, and hope to send you in the course of a day or two, the dietary of the hospital, from which it will appear that there is no disposition, in that case at least, to withhold a sufficiency of nourishing food.

I beg leave, at the same time, to express my firm belief that the sentiment of the people at the North is strongly as possible in favor of a humane and generous treatment of the prisoners, both as a matter of duty and as an instrument of ultimate reconciliation, and this, notwithstanding that they are convinced, and in fact have the proof before their eyes, that their own soldiers are treated with the greatest barbarity in Southern prisons. I am, etc.,

Manchester, Dec. 27.

GOLDWIN SMITH.

In a spirit not unlike that exhibited by Lord Wharncliffe, certain officious intermeddlers in England, under the leadership of titled Briton. named De Houghton, had prepared an

address to the people of the United States, expressing an carnest desire for peace. This paper, alleged to have received the signatures of three hundred and fifty thousand persons ("mostly fools," as Carlyle would say), in Great Britain, was first transmitted to Governor Seymour, of New York, who prudently declined the part assigned him of presenting it to President Lincoln. Finally, an English messenger named Parker, undertook the task of delivering this precious parcel at the White House, and arrived in Washington for the purpose. The Senate having, on the 6th of December, requested the President to furnish "any information in the Department of State, concerning any proposition or overture recently made by British subjects in aid of the rebellion," Mr. Seward next day transmitted to that body the following correspondence on the subject of the peace memorial in question. It presents a rare example of diplomatic directness and brevity:

MR. PARKER TO MR. SEWARD.

WASHINGTON, November 26, 1804. Hon. W. H. Seward, Secretary of State, etc.:

HON. SIR: I beg to inform you that I have been deputed to convey to this country an address from the people of Great Britain and Ireland to the people of the United States of America. The address was presented to Governor Seymour, for him to present through the proper channel.

I was requested by him to convey it to the President of the United States, as the authorized channel of communication between the people of other nations and the people of the United States of America.

May I, therefore, ask the honor of an opportunity for so doing.

I am, Hon. Sir, yours most obediently,

JOSEPH PARKER.

MR. PARKER TO MR. SEWARD.

METROPOLITAN HOTEL, WASHINGTON, November 26, 1864.

Hon. W. II. Seward, Secretary of State, etc.:

HON. SIR: In reply of your letter of to-day, permit me to state that the address which I have had the honor of being deputed by the parties signing it to bring to this country, and

containing the signatures of some three hundred and fifty thousand of my countrymen, from the peer to the artisan, is not from the Government of Great Britain, nor from any political party. It is simply an expression of the earnest desire of the masses of the people of Great Britain to see peace again restored to this continent.

Waiting your favors, I am, Hon. Sir, yours, most obediently, JOSEPH PARKER.

MR. SEWARD TO MR, PARKER,

DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON, November 26, 1864.

To Joseph Parker, Washington, D. C.:

SIR: Your letter of this date, stating that you are the bearer of an address from the people of Great Britain and Ireland to the people of the United States, has been received.

Before answering the question which your letter contains, it is desirable to be further informed whether you have authority from the Government of Great Britain and Ireland for the purpose referred to, and whether your mission has been made known to the diplomatic agent of that Government accredited to the Government of the United States?

I am, sir, your very obedient servant,

WILLIAM H. SEWARD.

MR. SEWARD TO MR. PARKER.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON, November 26, 1864.

To Joseph Parker, Esq., Metropolitan Hotel:

}

SIR: The Government of the United States can not receive the address which was mentioned in your notes of this morning. Your request for an interview with the President, to present the address, is, therefore, declined.

I am, sir, your obedient servant,

WILLIAM H. SEWARD.

In marked contrast with these demonstrations of Wharncliffe and De Houghton-and perhaps called out by their acts—was the address of the English Workingmen to President Lincoln, congratulating him on his re-election. This paper first appeared in the London News of December 23d, 1864, and was transmitted to the President through Mr. Adams. It affords a fitting conclusion to the foregoing papers:

To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States:

SIR: We congratulate the American people on your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the slave power were the reserved watchword upon your first election, the triumphant war-cry of your re-election is "death to slavery." From the commencement of the Titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.

The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant, or prostituted by the tramp of the slave-driver? When an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, slavery on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up whence the first declaration of the rights of man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counter revolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding " the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the Old Constitution," and maintained slavery to be a beneficent institution, indeed the only solution of the great problem of the relation of capital to labor, "and cynically proclaimed property in man" the corner stone of the new edifice; then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the frantic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic.

Everywhere they bore, therefore, patiently, the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention importunities of their "betters," and from most parts of Europe contributed their quota of blood to the good cause. While the workingmen, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted in the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American