The recent “masterly inactivity” of our new administration has ceased to be a mystery. It is at length understood. Professions and appearances of peace, conciliation and forbearance in regard to the seceded States were all well enough in view of Mr. Secretary Chase’s call upon Wall street for eight millions in the way of a loan, and in view of certain elections in Connecticut and Rhode Island. But those elections being over, and Mr. Chase’s loan having been sufficiently successful to delude him with the idea that, come what may, he has only to ask in order to receive any amount of money from our Wall street financiers, we find that all these late professions and pretences of peace and conciliation were only disguises, which, having served their objects, are now thrown aside. The people of Connecticut and Rhode Island have been deceived, and the sharp and knowing money changers of Wall street have been egregiously humbugged. War, and not peace, it is now manifest, has been all along the fixed policy and purpose of Mr. Lincoln’s administration.

Our new President has some reputation as a joker, and the practical jokes, in the game of hide and peek, which he has been playing with Fort Sumter for several weeks, have certainly been very amusing. Astonished one day by authentic advices from Washington of a Cabinet decision for the immediate evacuation of said fort, and taken somewhat aback the next day by reliable information that there has been no Cabinet decision on the subject, we have been positively assured on the third day that if Major Anderson cannot be relieved he will be left himself to choose between starvation, evacuation or capitulation. Fourthly, all the Washington correspondents concur in the report that though Fort Sumter may be abandoned, Fort Pickens will be held by our government “at all hazards and to the last extremity.”