Lord Hobart has been trying to make out a case
for including the reference of our right to acknowledge the belligerency of the South in the reference to arbitration proposed by Lord Stanley as to the Alabama claims. We cannot say that we think he has made much of it. We doubt exceedingly whether Mr. Seward has ever wished to settle this dispute, and whether, even if Lord Stanley had allowed the argument brought before the arbiter to include the consideration of our right or wrong in that matter, Mr. Seward would not have insisted on some new inad- missible condition on purpose to keep it open. There is some- thing simply ludicrous in our admitting the argument that after the President had declared the blockade of the Southern Coast, England was not to be allowed to assume the existence of a great civil war, and regard as a belligerent the power treated by the Worth as a belligerent.- " Historicus " has been unanswerable in his reply to Lord Hobart; but there is nothing of which it is .so easy to get too much as unanswerability, and we must say that Historicus" even parades it. There is no improving on certainty.
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