Government, was vital to our cause. Russell and Palmerston were by turns

insolent and shifty, and once on the very brink of recognizing the
Southern Confederacy as an independent nation. Gladstone, Chancellor of

the Exchequer, in a speech at Newcastle, virtually did recognize it. You
will be proud of Mr. Adams if you read how he bore himself and fulfilled

his appallingly delicate and difficult mission. He was an American who
knew how to behave himself, and he behaved himself all the time; while

the English had a way of turning their behavior on and off, like the hot
water. Mr. Adams was no admirer of "shirt-sleeves" diplomacy. His

diplomacy wore a coat. Our experiments in "shirt-sleeves" diplomacy
fail to show that it accomplishes anything which diplomacy decently

dressed would not accomplish more satisfactorily. Upon Mr. Adams fell
some consequences of previous American crudities, of which I shall speak

later.
Lincoln had declared a blockade on Southern ports before Mr. Adams

arrived in London. Upon his arrival he found England had proclaimed her
neutrality and recognized the belligerency of the South. This dismayed

Mr. Adams and excited the whole North, because feeling ran too high to
perceive this first act on England's part to be really favorable to us;

she could not recognize our blockade, which stopped her getting Southern
cotton, unless she recognized that the South was in a state of war with

us. Looked at quietly, this act of England's helped us and hurt herself,
for it deprived her of cotton.

It was not with this, but with the reception and treatment of Mr. Adams
that the true hostility began. Slights to him were slaps at us, sympathy

with the South was an active moral injury to our cause, even if it was
mostly an undertone, politically. Then all of a sudden, something that we

did ourselves changed the undertone to a loud overtone, and we just
grazed England's declaring war on us. Had she done so, then indeed it had

been all up with us. This incident is the comic going-back on our own
doctrine of 1812, to which I have alluded above.

On November 8, 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes of the American steam sloop
San Jacinto, fired a shot across the bow of the British vessel Trent,

stopped her on the high seas, and took four passengers off her, and
brought them prisoners to Fort Warren, in Boston harbor. Mason and

Slidell are the two we remember, Confederate envoys to France and Great
Britain. Over this the whole North burst into glorious joy. Our Secretary

of the Navy wrote to Wilkes his congratulations, Congress voted its
thanks to him, governors and judges laureled him with oratory at

banquets, he was feasted with meat and drink all over the place, and,
though his years were sixty-three, ardent females probably rushed forth

from throngs and kissed him with the purest intentions: heroes have no
age. But presently the Trent arrived in England, and the British lion was

aroused. We had violated international law, and insulted the British
flag. Palmerston wrote us a letter--or Russell, I forget which wrote it--

a letter that would have left us no choice but to fight. But Queen
Victoria had to sign it before it went. "My lord," she said, "you must

know that I will agree to no paper that means war with the United
States." So this didn't go, but another in its stead, pretty stiff,

naturally, yet still possible for us to swallow. Some didn't want to
swallow even this; but Lincoln, humorous and wise, said, "Gentlemen, one

war at a time;" and so we made due restitution, and Messrs. Mason and
Slidell went their way to France and England, free to bring about action

against us there if they could manage it. Captain Wilkes must have been a
good fellow. His picture suggests this. England, in her English heart,

really liked what he had done, it was in its gallant flagrancy so
remarkably like her own doings--though she couldn't, naturally, permit

such a performance to pass; and a few years afterwards, for his services
in the cause of exploration, her Royal Geographical Society gave him a

gold medal! Yes; the whole thing is comic--to-day; for us, to-day, the
point of it is, that the English Queen saved us from a war with England.

Within a year, something happened that was not comic. Lord John Russell,
though warned and warned, let the Alabama slip away to sea, where she

proceeded to send our merchant ships to the bottom, until the Kearsarge
sent her herself to the bottom. She had been built at Liverpool in the

face of an English law which no quibbling could disguise to anybody
except to Lord John Russell and to those who, like him, leaned to the

South. Ten years later, this leaning cost England fifteen million dollars
in damages.

Let us now listen to what our British friends were saying in those years
before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. His blockade had

brought immediate and heavy distress upon many English workmen and their
families. That had been April 19, 1861. By September, five sixths of the

Lancashire cotton-spinners were out of work, or working half time. Their
starvation and that of their wives and children could be stemmed by

charity alone. I have talked with people who saw those thousands in their
suffering. Yet those thousands bore it. They somehow looked through

Lincoln's express disavowal of any intention to interfere with slavery,
and saw that at bottom our war was indeed against slavery, that slavery

was behind the Southern camouflage about independence, and behind the
Northern slogan about preserving the Union. They saw and they stuck.

"Rarely," writes Charles Francis Adams, "in the history of mankind, has
there been a more creditable exhibition of human sympathy." France was

likewise damaged by our blockade; and Napoleon III would have liked to
recognize the South. He established, through Maximilian, an empire in

Mexico, behind which lay hostility to our Democracy. He wished us defeat;
but he was afraid to move without England, to whom he made a succession

of indirect approaches. These nearly came to something towards the close
of 1862. It was on October 7th that Gladstone spoke at Newcastle about

Jefferson Davis having made a nation. Yet, after all, England didn't
budge, and thus held Napoleon back. From France in the end the South got

neither ships nor recognition, in spite of his deceitful connivance and
desire; Napoleon flirted a while with Slidell, but grew cold when he saw

no chance of English cooperation.
Besides John Bright and Cobden, we had other English friends of influence

and celebrity: John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, Goldwin Smith, Leslie
Stephen, Robert Gladstone, Frederic Harrison are some of them. All from

the first supported us. All from the first worked and spoke for us. The
Union and Emancipation Society was founded. "Your Committee," says its

final report when the war was ended, "have issued and circulated upwards
of four hundred thousand books, pamphlets, and tracts... and nearly five

hundred official and public meetings have been held..." The president of
this Society, Mr. Potter, spent thirty thousand dollars in the cause, and

at a time when times were hard and fortunes as well as cotton-spinners in
distress through our blockade. Another member of the Society, Mr.

Thompson, writes of one of the public meetings: "... I addressed a
crowded assembly of unemployed operatives in the town of Heywood, near

Manchester, and spoke to them for two hours about the Slaveholders'
Rebellion. They were united and vociferous in the expression of their

willingness to suffer all hardships consequent upon a want of cotton, if
thereby the liberty of the victims of Southern despotism might be

promoted. All honor to the half million of our working population in
Lancashire, Cheshire, and elsewhere, who are bearing with heroic

fortitude the privation which your war has entailed upon them!... Their
sublime resignation, their self-forgetfulness, their observance of law,

their whole-souled love of the cause of human freedom, their quick and
clear perception of the merits of the question between the North and the

South... are extorting the admiration of all classes of the community
..."

How much of all this do you ever hear from the people who remember the
Alabama?

Strictly in accord with Beecher's vivid summary of the true England in
our Civil War, are some passages of a letter from Mr. John Bigelow, who

was at that time our Consul-General at Paris, and whose impressions,
written to our Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, on February 6, 1863, are

interesting to compare with what Beecher says in that letter, from which
I have already given extracts.

"The anti-slavery meetings in England are having their effect upon the
Government already... The Paris correspondent of the London Post also

came to my house on Wednesday evening... He says... that there are
about a dozen persons who by their position and influence over the organs

of public opinion have produced all the bad feeling and treacherous con-
duct of England towards America. They are people who, as members of

the Government in times past, have been bullied by the U. S.... They are
not entirely ignorant that the class who are now trying to overthrow the

Government were mainlyresponsible for the brutality, but they think we
as a nation are disposed to bully, and they are disposed to assist in any