d him with the purest intentions: heroes have no
age. But presently the Trent arrived in England, and the British lion
was aroused. We had violated international law, and insulted the British
flag. Palmerston wrote us a letter--or Russell, I forget which wrote
it--a letter that would have left us no choice but to fight. But Queen
Victoria had to sign it before it went. "My lord," she said, "you
must know that I will agree to no paper that means war with the United
States." So this didn't go, but another in its stead, pretty stiff,
naturally, yet still possible for us to swallow. Some didn't want to
swallow even this; but Lincoln, humorous and wise, said, "Gentlemen, one
war at a time;" and so we made due restitution, and Messrs. Mason and
Slidell went their way to France and England, free to bring about action
against us there if they could manage it. Captain Wilkes must have been
a good fellow. His picture suggests this. England, in her English
heart, really liked what he had done, it was in its gallant flagrancy so
remarkably like her own doings--though she couldn't, naturally, permit
such a performance to pass; and a few years afterwards, for his services
in the cause of exploration, her Royal Geographical Society gave him a
gold medal! Yes; the whole thing is comic--to-day; for us, to-day, the
point of it is, that the English Queen saved us from a war with England.

Within a year, something happened that was not comic. Lord John Russell,
though warned and warned, let the Alabama slip away to sea, where she
proceeded to send our merchant ships to the bottom, until the Kearsarge
sent her herself to the bottom. She had been built at Liverpool in the
face of an English law which no quibbling could disguise to anybody
except to Lord John Russell and to those who, like him, leaned to
the South. Ten years later, this leaning cost England fifteen million
dollars in damages.

Let us now listen to what our British friends were saying in those years
before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. His blockade had
brought immediate and heavy distress upon many English workmen and their
families. That had been April 19, 1861. By September, five sixths of the
Lancashire cotton-spinners were out of work, or working half time. Their
starvation and that of their wives and children could be stemmed by
charity alone. I have talked with people who saw those thousands in
their suffering. Yet those thousands bore it. They somehow lo