racy as an independent country; that they were then likely to
offer mediation which it would at the best have been embarrassing for
the President to reject; that they might ultimately, when their
mediation had been rejected, be tempted to active intervention. It is
curious that the one European Government which was recognised all along
as friendly to the Republic was that of the Czar, Alexander II. of
Russia, who in this same year, 1861, was accomplishing the project,
bequeathed to him by his father, of emancipating the serfs. Mercier,
the French Minister in Washington, advised his Government to recognise
the South Confederacy as early as March, 1861. The Emperor of the
French, though not the French people, inclined throughout to this
policy; but he would not act apart from England, and the English
Government, though Americans did not know it, had determined, and for
the present was quite resolute, against any hasty action. Nevertheless
an almost accidental cause very soon brought England and the North
within sight of a war from which neither people was in appearance
averse.

Neither the foreign policy of Lincoln's Government nor, indeed, the
relations of England and America from his day to our own can be
understood without some study of the attitude of the two countries to
each other during the war. If we could put aside any previous judgment
on the cause as between North and South, there are still some marked
features in the attitude of England during the war which every
Englishman must now regret. It should emphatically be added that there
were some upon which every Englishman should look back with
satisfaction. Many of the expressions of English opinion at that time
betray a powerlessness to comprehend another country and a
self-sufficiency in judging it, which, it may humbly be claimed, were
not always and are not now so characteristic of Englishmen as they were
in that period of our history, in many ways so noble, which we
associate with the rival influences of Palmerston and of Cobden. It is
not at all surprising that ordinary English gentlemen started with a
leaning towards the South; they liked Southerners and there was much in
the manners of the North, and in the experiences of Englishmen trading
with or investing in the North, which did not impress them favourably.
Many Northerners discovered something snobbish and unsound in this
preference, but they were not quite right. With this leaning,
English