rners thought that at least some courteous explanation
should first have been made to their Government, and there were other
matters which they misinterpreted as signs of an agreement of England
with France to go further and open diplomatic relations with the
Confederate Government. Thus alike in the most prejudiced and in the
most enlightened quarters in the North there arose an irritation which
an Englishman must see to have been natural but can hardly think to
have been warranted by the real facts.

Here came in the one clearly known and most certainly happy
intervention of Lincoln's in foreign affairs. Early in May Seward
brought to him the draft of a vehement despatch, telling the British
Government peremptorily what the United States would not stand, and
framed in a manner which must have frustrated any attempt by Adams in
London to establish good relations with Lord John Russell. That draft
now exists with the alterations made in Lincoln's own hand. With a few
touches, some of them very minute, made with the skill of a master of
language and of a life-long peacemaker, he changed the draft into a
firm but entirely courteous despatch. In particular, instead of
requiring Adams, as Seward would have done, to read the whole despatch
to Russell and leave him with a copy of it, he left it to the man on
the spot to convey its sense in what manner he judged best. Probably,
as has been claimed for him, his few penstrokes made peaceful relations
easy when Seward's despatch would have made them almost impossible;
certainly a study of this document will prove both his strange,
untutored diplomatic skill and the general soundness of his view of
foreign affairs.

Now, however, followed a graver crisis in which his action requires
some discussion. Messrs. Mason and Slidell were sent by the
Confederate Government as their emissaries to England and France. They
got to Havana and there took ship again on the British steamer _Trent_.
A watchful Northern sea captain overhauled the _Trent_, took Mason and
Slidell off her, and let her go. If he had taken the course, far more
inconvenient to the _Trent_, of bringing her into a Northern harbour,
where a Northern Prize Court might have adjudged these gentlemen to be
bearers of enemy despatches, he would have been within the law. As it
was he violated well-established usage, and no one has questioned the
right and even the duty of the British Government to demand the release
of