April 6th.—To-day I paid a second visit to General Scott, who received me very kindly, and made many inquiries respecting the events in the Crimea and the Indian mutiny and rebellion.  He professed to have no apprehension for the safety of the capital; but in reality there are only some 700 or 800 regulars to protect it and the Navy Yard, and two field-batteries, commanded by an officer of very doubtful attachment to the Union.  The head of the Navy Yard is openly accused of treasonable sympathies.

 Mr. Seward has definitively refused to hold any intercourse whatever with the Southern Commissioners, and they will retire almost immediately from the capital.  As matters look very threatening, I must go South and see with my own eyes how affairs stand there, before the two sections come to open rupture.  Mr. Seward, the other day, in talking of the South, described them as being in every respect behind the age, with fashions, habits, level of thought, and modes of life, belonging to the worst part of the last century.  But still he never has been there himself! The Southern men come up to the Northern cities and springs, but the Northerner rarely travels southwards.  Indeed, I am informed, that if he were a well-known Abolitionist, it would not be safe for him to appear in a Southern city.  I quite agree with my thoughtful and earnest friend, Olmsted, that the United States can never be considered as a free country till a man can speak as freely in Charleston as he can in New York or Boston.

 I dined with Mr. Biggs, the banker, who had an agreeable party to meet me.  Mr. Corcoran, his former partner, who was present, erected at his own cost, and presented to the city, a fine building, to be used as an art gallery and museum ; but as yet the arts which are to be found in Washington are political and feminine only.  Mr. Corcoran has a private gallery of pictures, and a collection, in which is the much-praised Greek Slave of Hiram Powers.  The gentry of Columbia are thoroughly Virginian in sentiment, and look rather south than north of the Potomac for political results.  The President, I hear this evening, is alarmed lest Virginia should become hostile, and his policy, if he has any, is temporising and timid.  It is perfectly wonderful to hear people using the word  “Government” at all, as applied to the President and his cabinet— a body which has no power “according to the constitution” to save the country governed or itself from destruction.  In fact, from the circumstances under which the constitution was framed, it was natural that the principal point kept in view should be the exhibition of a strong front to foreign powers, combined with the least possible amount of constriction on the internal relations of the different States.

 In the hotel the roar of office-seekers is unabated.  Train after train adds to their numbers.  They cumber the passages.  The hall is crowded to such a degree that suffocation might describe the degree to which the pressure reaches, were it not that tobacco-smoke invigorates and sustains the constitution.  As to the condition of the floor it is beyond description.