"You will be allowed at the rate of two thousand dollars per annum, payable quarterly, for your compensation, besides your traveling expenses and disbursements for the purposes of your mission. You have already received an advance of fifteen hundred dollars. On rendering accounts for one thousand dollars of that sum, you may draw upon the Comptroller for another sum of one thousand dollars in advance, in like manner, and so on, accounting and drawing the extent of the amount appropriated in the bill.

" In testimony whereof, I have hereunto subscribed my name, and caused the [ L. s. ] great seal of the State to be affixed, this twenty-seventh day of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the sixty-fifth. " WILLIAM H. SEWARD."

In pursuance of his commission and instructions, Mr. Bkodhead embarked for Europe on the first of May, 1841. He commenced his investigations in the archives at the Hague in the following summer ; and for nearly three years was diligently engaged in prosecuting his labors in the several Record offices of Holland, England and

XX GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

Trance. It was necessary, in the first place, to procure the official authority from the

proper departments of government, without which the documents the Agent was instructed to procure could neither he inspected nor copied. In Holland and in France,

the requisite permission was readily and liberally granted. But in England the official regulations were much more embarrassing.