n.... I implore you
not, on any feeling that nothing can be conceded, and that England is
arrogant and seeking a quarrel, to play the game of every enemy of your
country."(52) A French despatch in the English sense was also read. Seward
and Sumner were in favour of giving up the men. The president, thinking of
popular excitement, hesitated. In the end, partly because the case was bad
on the merits, partly because they could not afford to have a second great
war upon their hands, all came round to Seward's view.(53)

III

By the autumn of 1862 the war had lasted a year and a half. It was already
entailing a cost heavier than our war with Napoleon at its most expensive
period. The North had still failed to execute its declared purpose of
reducing the South to submission. The blockade of the Southern ports, by
stopping the export of cotton, was declared to have produced worse
privations, loss, and suffering to England and France than were ever
produced to neutral nations by a war. It was not in Mr. Gladstone's nature
to sit with folded hands in sight of what he took to be hideous and
unavailing carnage and havoc. Lord Palmerston, he tells Mrs. Gladstone
(July 29, 1862), "has come exactly to my mind about some early
representation of a friendly kind to America, if we can get France _and_
Russia to join." A day or two later (Aug. 3) he writes to the Duke of
Argyll: "My _opinion_ is that it is vain, and wholly unsustained by
precedent, to say nothing shall be done until both parties are desirous of
it; that, however, we ought to avoid sole action, or anything except
acting in such a combination as would morally represent the weight of
impartial Europe; that with this view we ought to communicate with France
and Russia; to make with them a friendly representation (if they are ready
to do it) of the mischief and the hopelessness of prolonging the contest
in which both sides have made extraordinary and heroic efforts; but if
they are not ready, then to wait for some opportunity when they may be
disposed to move with us. The adhesion of other powers would be desirable
if it does not encumber the movement."

"In the year 1862," says Mr. Gladstone in a fragment of autobiography, "I
had emerged from very grave financial [budget] difficulties, which in 1860
and 1861 went near to breaking me down. A blue sky was now above me, and
some of the Northern liberals devised for me a triumphant visit to the
Tyne, which of course entai