country polled, I fear 999 men out
of a thousand would declare for immediate war. Lord Palmerston cannot
resist the impulse if he would." And another American, in Edinburgh,
wrote to his uncle in New York: "I have never seen so intense a feeling
of indignation exhibited in my life. It pervades all classes, and may
make itself heard above the wiser theories of the Cabinet
officers[433]." If such were the British temper, it would require
skilful handling by even a pacific-minded Government to avoid war. Even
without belligerent newspaper utterances the tone of arrogance as in
_Punch's_ cartoon, "You do what's right, my son, or I'll blow you out of
the water," portended no happy solution. Yet this cartoon at least
implied a hope of peaceful outcome, and that this was soon a general
hope is shown by the prompt publicity given to a statement from the
American General, Winfield Scott, in Paris, denying that he had said the
action of Captain Wilkes had been decided upon at Washington before he
sailed for Europe, and asserting that no orders were given to seize the
envoys on board any British or foreign vessel[434]. Nevertheless, Adams,
for the moment intensely aroused, and suspicious of the whole purpose of
British policy, could write to his friend Dana in Boston: "The
expression of the past summer might have convinced you that she [Great
Britain] was not indifferent to the disruption of the Union. In May she
drove in the tip of the wedge, and now you can't imagine that a few
spiders' webs of a half a century back will not be strong enough to hold
her from driving it home. Little do you understand of this fast-anchored
isle[435]."

There can be no doubt that one cause of a more bitter and sharper tone
in the British press was the reception of the counter-exultation of the
American press on learning of the detention and the exercise of "right
of search" on a British ship. The American public equally went "off its
head" in its expressions. Writing in 1911, the son of the American
Minister to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, jun., in 1861, a young
law-student in Boston, stated: "I do not remember in the whole course of
the half-century's retrospect ... any occurrence in which the American
people were so completely swept off their feet, for the moment losing
possession of their senses, as during the weeks which immediately
followed the seizure of Mason and Slidell[436]." There were evident two
principal causes for this elati