o
fill the country with grief and indignation, but to evoke
almost unprecedented expressions of feeling from constituted
bodies. It was but on Wednesday that the intelligence of the
murder reached us, and on Thursday the Houses of Lords and
Commons, the Corporation of the City of London, and the
people of our chief manufacturing towns in public meeting
assembled had recorded their sentiments or expressed their
views. In the House of Lords the absence of precedent for
such a manifestation was actually made the subject of remark.

"That much of this extraordinary feeling is due to the
tragical character of the event and the horror with which the
crime is regarded is doubtless true, nor need we dissemble
the the fact that the loss which the Americans have sustained
is also thought our own loss in so far as one valuable
guarantee for the amity of the two nations may have been thus
removed. But, upon the whole, it is neither the possible
embarrassment of international relations nor the infamous
wickedness of the act itself which has determined public
feeling. The preponderating sentiment is sincere and genuine
sympathy--- sorrow for the chief of a great people struck
down by an assassin, and sympathy for that people in the
trouble which at a crisis of their destinies such a
catastrophe must bring. Abraham Lincoln was as little of a
tyrant as any man who ever lived. He could have been a tyrant
had he pleased, but he never uttered so much as an
ill-natured speech.... In all America there was, perhaps, not
one man who less deserved to be the victim of this revolution
than he who has just fallen[1296]."

The Ministry did not wait for public pressure. Immediately on receipt
of the news, motions were made, April 27, in both Lords and Commons for
an address to the Queen, to be debated "Monday next," expressing "sorrow
and indignation" at the assassination of Lincoln[1297]. April 28,
Russell instructed Bruce to express at Washington that "the Government,
the Parliament, and the Nation are affected by a unanimous feeling of
abhorrence of the criminals guilty of these cowardly and atrocious
crimes, and sympathy for the Government and People of the United
States[1298]...." Russell wrote here of both Lincoln and Seward. The
Queen wrote a personal letter of sympathy to Mrs. Lincoln. Already Bruce