y in August, came as a surprise to the British Ministry.
Their progress toward mediation had been slow but steady. Lindsay's
initial steps, resented as an effort in indirect diplomacy and not
supported by France officially, had received prompt rejection
accompanied by no indication of a desire to depart from strict
neutrality. With the cessation in late June of the Northern victorious
progress in arms and in the face of increasing distress in Lancashire,
the second answer to Lindsay was less dogmatic. As given by Palmerston
the Government desired to offer mediation, but saw no present hope of
doing so successfully. Finally the Government asked for a free hand,
making no pledges. Mason might be gloomy, Adams exultant, but when
August dawned plans were already on foot for a decided change. The
secret was well kept. Four days after the Cabinet decision to wait on
events, two days after Russell's refusal to produce the correspondence
with Mason, Russell, on the eve of departure for the Continent, was
writing to Palmerston:

"Mercier's notion that we should make some move in October
agrees very well with yours. I shall be back in England
before October, and we could then have a Cabinet upon it. Of
course the war may flag before that.

"I quite agree with you that a proposal for an armistice
should be the first step; but we must be prepared to answer
the question on what basis are we to negotiate[733]?"

The next movement to put an end to the war in America was to come, not
from Napoleon III, nor from the British friends of the South, but from
the British Ministry itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 654: Bancroft, _Seward_, II, p. 204.]

[Footnote 655: _De Bow's Review_, Dec., 1857, p. 592.]

[Footnote 656: Cited in Adams, _Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity_,
p. 66.]

[Footnote 657: _Ibid._, p. 64.]

[Footnote 658: Cited in Smith, _Parties and Slavery_, 68. A remarkable
exposition of the "power of cotton" and the righteousness of slavery was
published in Augusta, Georgia, in 1860, in the shape of a volume of nine
hundred pages, entitled _Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments_.
This reproduced seven separate works by distinguished Southern writers
analysing Slavery from the point of view of political economy, moral and
political philosophy, social ethics, political science, ethnology,
international law, and the Bible. The purpose of this united publication
was to prove the rig