nd third articles[279]. For the
moment Russell appears to have yielded easily to this French advice. On
May 13 he had that interview with the Southern commissioners in which he
mentioned a communication about to be made to the South[280]; and on May
15 the London _Times_, presumably reflecting governmental decision, in
commenting on the Proclamation of Neutrality, developed at some length
the idea that British citizens, if they served on Southern privateers,
could claim no protection from Great Britain if the North chose to treat
them as pirates. May 16, Cowley reported that Thouvenel had written
Mercier in the terms of Russell's draft to Lyons of the eleventh, but
omitting the part about privateering[281], and on this same day Russell
sent to Cowley a copy of a _new_ draft of instructions to Lyons,
seemingly in exact accord with the French idea[282]. On the seventeenth,
Cowley reported this as highly satisfactory to Thouvenel[283]. Finally
on May 18 the completed instruction was despatched.

It was on this same day, May 18, that Adams had his first interview with
Russell. All that had been planned by Great Britain and France had been
based on their estimate of the necessity of the situation. They had no
knowledge of Seward's instructions of April 24. When therefore Adams,
toward the conclusion of his interview, stated his authority to
negotiate a convention, he undoubtedly took Russell by surprise. So far
as he was concerned a suggestion to the North, the result of an
agreement made with France after some discussion and delay, was in fact
completed, and the draft finally drawn _two days before_, on the
sixteenth. Even if not actually sent, as Henry Adams thinks, it was a
completed agreement. Russell might well speak of it as an instruction
already given to Lyons. Moreover there were two points in Adams'
conversation of the eighteenth likely to give Russell cause for thought.
The first was Adams' protest against the British recognition of a status
of belligerency. If the North felt so earnestly about this, had it been
wise to instruct Lyons to make an approach to the South? This required
consideration. And in the second place did not Adams' offer again open
up the prospect of somehow getting from the North at least a formal and
permanent renunciation of privateering?

For if an examination is made of Russell's instruction to Lyons of May
18 it appears that he had not, after all, dropped that reference to
privateering w