toward
America. Still more it became evident that the American Civil War, as
seen through British spectacles, could not be understood if regarded as
an isolated and unique situation, but that the conditions preceding that
situation--some of them lying far back in the relations of the two
nations--had a vital bearing on British policy and opinion when the
crisis arose. No expanded examination of these preceding conditions is
here possible, but it is to a summary analysis of them that this first
chapter is devoted.

* * * * *

On the American War for separation from the Mother Country it is
unnecessary to dilate, though it should always be remembered that both
during the war and afterwards there existed a minority in Great Britain
strongly sympathetic with the political ideals proclaimed in
America--regarding those ideals, indeed, as something to be striven for
in Britain itself and the conflict with America as, in a measure, a
conflict in home politics. But independence once acknowledged by the
Treaty of Peace of 1783, the relations between the Mother Country and
the newly-created United States of America rapidly tended to adjust
themselves to lines of contact customary between Great Britain and any
other Sovereign State. Such contacts, fixing national attitude and
policy, ordinarily occur on three main lines: governmental, determined
by officials in authority in either State whose duty it is to secure the
greatest advantage in power and prosperity for the State; commercial,
resulting, primarily, from the interchange of goods and the business
opportunities of either nation in the other's territory, or from their
rivalry in foreign trade; idealistic, the result of comparative
development especially in those ideals of political structure which
determine the nature of the State and the form of its government. The
more obvious of these contacts is the governmental, since the attitude
of a people is judged by the formal action of its Government, and,
indeed, in all three lines of contact the government of a State is
directly concerned and frequently active. But it may be of service to a
clearer appreciation of British attitude and policy before 1860, if the
intermingling of elements required by a strict chronological account of
relations is here replaced by a separate review of each of the three
main lines of contact.

Once independence had been yielded to the American Colonies, the
interes