int to what after a long
struggle became the solution of these difficulties, by assuring Lord
Russell that there was "no fair and equitable form of conventional
arbitrament or reference" to which America would not be willing to submit.
In 1865 (Sept. 2) Mr. Gladstone wrote a letter to Lord Russell, the reply
to which has already been published.(257) Always jealous for cabinet
authority, he began by submitting to Lord Russell that he had no idea that
a despatch refusing arbitration was to be written, without a cabinet being
held upon a subject so important. As it was, they had not disposed of the
question or even discussed it. On the merits, he inclined to believe that
the demand for arbitration was highly unreasonable; still though not
disposed to say "Yes" to the demand, he doubted "No." The proper course
would be to lead the Americans to bring out the whole of their case, so
that the cabinet might have all the pleas before them previously to coming
to "a decision of great delicacy and moment."

Lord Russell stood to his guns. "The question," he said, "has been the
principal object of my thoughts for the last two years, and I confess I
think that paying twenty millions down would be far preferable to
submitting the case to arbitration." England would be disgraced for ever
if a foreign government were left to arbitrate whether an English
secretary of state had been diligent or negligent in his duties, and
whether an English law officer was partial and prejudiced in giving his
opinion of English law. There the matter stood, and the moral war
smouldered on.

II

In 1870, the time arrived when Mr. Gladstone himself, no longer a minister
third in standing in a Palmerston government, was called upon to deal with
this great issue as a principal in his own administration. In 1868 the
conservative government had agreed to a convention, by which a mixed
commission, British and American, sitting in London should decide upon the
settlement of all claims by the subjects of either country upon the other;
and in respect of what were known generically as the _Alabama_ Claims,
proposing to refer these to the arbitration of the head of some friendly
state, in case the mixed commission should not agree. The idea of a
composite court or tribunal, as distinguished from a single sovereign
arbitrator, had not yet risen above the horizon. Before this project
ripened, Mr. Disraeli was out of government, Lord Clarendon had taken Lord
S