Allowing for the exigencies of a Presidential campaign. there seems
no reason at all to doubt that the award of the Geneva Tribunal has been received with great satisfaction in the United States, nor that it has really answered the purpose of removing the sense of chronic irritation between the two peoples. Of course tile Greeley journals, which cannot afford to admit that General Grant's Administration has done anything right, will not concede this, are loud in their condemnation of the whole conduct of the affair by the United States, and maintain, somewhat paradoxically, that British diplomacy has utterly circumvented the representatives of the United States, and gained virtually a complete British victory. But no weight is to be attached to these electioneering allegations. The true gauge of United States' opinion is the view taken by neutral journals, whose tone is chiefly economical or (in a legal sense) scientific, and these journals seem to be substantially satisfied. For example, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, while maintaining that the Geneva Tribunal ought to have given damages for six other vessels for which it has refused damages (the Georgia, Chickamauga, Nashville, Retribution, Sumter, and Tallahassee), still declares that there is great reason to be satisfied with the issue. And such, we may feel sure, is the sober judgment of the soberest people in the world,—though that people may be, and is, one whose true character is more curiously travestied and distorted than any other in the world by the manceuvres of political strategists and literary tacticians.
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