to do
so and protected it where he had power to abolish it. Of the million
voters in England at least three fourths seemed ready to vote for
Southern recognition, and all the great manufacturers, the powerful
merchants, the country gentry, and great nobles were openly contemptuous
of the cause and policy of the North. Carlyle ridiculed the "Yankees,"
and Dickens made fun of Lincoln, Sumner, Chase, and the rest. It was
apparently only a matter of weeks before Lord Palmerston would ask
Parliament to authorize him to intervene in order to stop the "useless"
bloodshed and slaughter of the war between the States.

In France the ruling class, the bankers, the industrialists, the higher
clergy, and many of the party of free trade supported Napoleon III in
his well-known friendliness for the South. Moreover, the Emperor was
promoting a scheme to build for his Austrian friend, Maximilian, an
empire in Mexico, where the perennial war of factions was hotly raging.
Davis might aid such a move as a consideration for recognition, and
certainly Seward was too busy with his own troubles to intervene on
behalf of an "outworn" Monroe Doctrine. Slidell, the shrewd Confederate
commissioner to France, led the Emperor to expect Southern support of
his scheme, and at the same time borrowed millions of dollars in gold
from rich Paris bankers and hurried it off to the famishing Confederacy.
No revolutionary power ever had a fairer chance of winning its goal than
did that of Davis and Lee in the autumn of 1862 and winter of 1863.

The unexpected often happens. While Charles Francis Adams was being
coldly elbowed out of the salons of an unsympathetic English nobility,
and when Confederate bonds were selling both in London and Paris at or
near par, Secretary Chase sent Robert J. Walker, the former Mississippi
repudiator and successful Secretary of the Treasury under Polk, to
Europe for the purpose of breaking down Confederate credit and building
up that of the United States.

The commissioner of the Treasury Department began the publication of a
series of articles on the financial page of the London _Times_ which
seemed to show that Davis had been responsible for the repudiation of a
large issue of state bonds, many of them held in London, in 1843. All
that Mason and Slidell could do did not remove the suspicion that the
Confederate President would "repudiate" again. Men who had loaned large
sums of money to Mississippi could not be made to und