The friends of the United States on this side’ of the Atlantic 
anxiously hope that conciliatory steps will be taken by the Federal 
Government. They do so not from a concurrence in the frantic 
crowing of the British press over a war incident, which, according 
to the English Crown lawyers themselves, resolves itself into a 
mere error of procedure, and may be summed up in the words 
that there has been a breach of international law, because Capt. 
Wilkes, instead of taking the Trent, her cargo, her passengers, and 
the Commissioners,* did only take the Commissioners. Nor springs 
the anxiety of the well-wishers of the Great Republic from an 
apprehension lest, in the long run, it should not prove able to 
cope with England, although backed by the civil war; and, least of 
all, do they expect the United States to abdicate, even for a 
moment, and in a dark hour of trial, the proud position held by 
them in the council of nations. The motives that prompt them are’ 
of quite a different nature. 

In the first instance, the business next in hand for the United 
States is to crush the rebellion and to restore the Union. The wish 
uppermost in the minds of the Slaveocracy and their Northern 
tools was always to plunge the United States into a war with 
England. The first step of England as soon as hostilities broke out 
would be to recognize the Southern Confederacy, and the second 
to terminate the blockade. Secondly, no general, if not forced, will 
accept battle at the time and under the conditions chosen by his 
enemy. 

“A war with America,” says The Economist, a paper deeply in Palmerston’s 
confidence, ‘‘must always be one of the most lamentable incidents in the history of 
England; but if it is to happen, the present is certainly the period at which it will do us 
the minimum of harm, and the only moment in our joint annals at which it would confer 
on us an incidental and partial compensation.” 2 

The very reasons accounting for the eagerness of England to 
seize upon any decent pretext for war at this “only moment” 
ought to withhold the United States from forwarding such a 
pretext at this “only moment.” You go not to war with the aim to 
do your enemy “the minimum of harm,” and, even to confer upon 
him by the war, “an incidental and partial compensation.” The 
opportunity of the moment would all be on one side, on the side 
of your foe. Is there any great strain of reasoning wanted to prove 
that an internal war raging in a State is the least opportune time 
for entering upon a foreign war? At every other moment the 
mercantile classes of Great Britain would have looked upon a war 
against the United States with the utmost horror. Now, on the 
contrary, a large and influential party of the mercantile communi- 
ty has for months been urging on the Government to violently 
break the blockade, and thus provide the main branch of British 
industry with its raw material. The fear of a curtailment of the 
English export trade to the United States has lost its sting by the 
curtailment of that trade having already actually occurred. “They” 
(the Northern States), says The Economist, “are wretched customers, 
instead of good ones.” The vast credit usually given by English 
commerce to the United States, principally by the acceptance of 
bills drawn from China and India, has been already reduced to 
scarcely a fifth of what it was in 1857. Last, not least, Decembrist 
France, bankrupt, paralyzed at home, beset with difficulty abroad, 
pounces upon an Anglo-American war as a real godsend, and, in 
order to buy English support in Europe, will strain all her power 
to support “Perfidious Albion” on the other side of the Atlantic. 
Read only the French newspapers. The pitch of indignation to 
which they have wrought themselves in their tender care for the 
“honor of England,” their fierce diatribes as to the necessity on 
the part of England to revenge the outrage on the Union Jack, 
their vile denunciations of everything American, would be truly- 
appalling, if they were not ridiculous and disgusting at the same 
time. Lastly, if the United States give way in this instance, they will 
not derogate one iota of their dignity. England has reduced her 
complaint to a mere error of procedure, a technical blunder of which 

No. 954, December 7, 1861.— Ed. 

she has made herself systematically guilty in all her maritime wars, 
but against which the United States have never ceased to protest, 
and which President Madison, in his message inaugurating the war 
of 1812,? expatiated upon as one of the most shocking breaches of 
international law. If the United States may be defended in paying 
England with her own coin, will they be accused for magnanim- 
ously disavowing, on the part of a single American captain,” acting 
on his own responsibility, what they always denounced as a 
systematic usurpation on the part of the British Navy! In point of 
fact, the gain of such a procedure would be all on the American 
side. England, on the one hand, would have acknowledged the 
right of the United States to capture and bring to adjudication 
before an American prize court every English ship employed in 
the service of the Confederation. On the other hand, she would, 
once for all, before the eyes of the whole world, have practically 
resigned a claim which she was not brought to desist from either 
in the peace of Ghent, in 1814,° or the transactions carried on 
between Lord Ashburton and Secretary Webster in 1842.'?? The 
question then comes to this: Do you prefer to turn the “untoward 
event” to your own account, or, blinded by the passions of 
the moment, turn it to the account of your foes at home and 
abroad? 

Since this day week, when I sent you my last letter,’ British 
consols have again lowered, the decline, compared with last 
Friday, amounting to 2 per cent, the present prices being 89°/, to 
“lg for money and 90 to 90'/s for the new account on the 9th of 
January. This quotation corresponds to the quotation of the 
British consols during the first two years of the Anglo-Russian 
war. This decline is altogether due to the warlike interpretation 
put upon the American papers conveyed by the last mail, to the 
exacerbating tone of the London press, whose moderation of two 
days’ standing was but a feint, ordered by Palmerston, to the 
dispatch of troops for Canada, to the proclamation forbidding the 
export of arms and materials for gunpowder‘ and lastly, to the 

[Washington, June 1, 1812].— Ed. 

America; signed at Ghent, December 24, 1814.— Ed. 

f Victoria, R., A Proclamation [December 4, 1861], The Times, No. 24108, 
December 5, 1861.— Ed. 

daily ostentatious statements concerning the formidable prepara- 
tions for war in the docks and maritime arsenals. 

Of one thing you may be sure, Palmerston wants a legal pretext 
for a war with the United States, but meets in the Cabinet councils 
with a most determinate opposition on the part of Messrs. 
Gladstone and Milner Gibson, and, to a less degree, of Sir 
Cornwall Lewis. “The noble viscount” is backed by Russell, an 
abject tool in his hands, and the whole Whig Coterie. If the 
Washington Cabinet should furnish the desired pretext, the 
present Cabinet will be sprung, to be supplanted by a Tory 
Administration. The preliminary steps for such a change of 
scenery have been already settled between Palmerston and 
Disraeli. Hence the furious war-cry of The Morning Herald and 
The Standard, those hungry wolves howling at the prospect of the 
long-missed crumbs from the public almoner. 

Palmerston’s designs may be shown up by calling into memory a 
few facts. It was he who insisted upon the _ proclamation, 
acknowledging the Secessionists as belligerents, on the morning of 
the 14th of May, after he had been informed by telegraph from 
Liverpool that Mr. Adams would arrive at London on the night of 
the 13th May. He, after a severe struggle with his colleagues, 
dispatched 3,000 men to Canada, an army ridiculous, if intended 
to cover a frontier of 1,500 miles, but a clever sleight-of-hand if 
the rebellion was to be cheered, and the Union to be irritated. He, 
many weeks ago, urged Bonaparte to propose a joint armed 
intervention “in the internecine struggle,” supported that project 
in the Cabinet council, and failed only in carrying it by the 
resistance of his colleagues. He and Bonaparte then resorted to 
the Mexican intervention as a pis aller* That operation served two 
purposes, by provoking just resentment on the part of the 
Americans, and by simultaneously furnishing a pretext for the 
dispatch of a squadron, ready, as The Morning Post has it, “to 
perform whatever duty the hostile conduct of the Government of 
Washington may require us to perform in the waters of the 
Northern Atlantic.” At the time when that expedition was 
started, The Morning Post, together with The Times and the smaller 
fry of Palmerston’s press slaves, said that it was a very fine thing, 
and a philanthropic thing into the bargain, because it would 
expose the slaveholding Confederation to two fires—the Anti- 

No. 27442, November 30, 1861.— Ed. 

Slavery North and the Anti-Slavery force of England and France. 
And what says the very same Morning Post, this curious compound 
of Jenkins and Rhodomonte, of plush and swash, in its to-day’s 
issue, on occasion of Jefferson Davis’s address?* Hearken to the 
Palmerston oracle: 

“We must look to this intervention as one that may be in operation during a 
considerable period of time; and while the Northern Government is too distant to 
admit of its attitude entering materially into this question, the Southern 
Confederation, on the other hand, stretches for a great distance along the frontier 
of Mexico, so as to render its friendly disposition to the authors of the insurrection of 
no slight consequence. The Northern Government has invariably railed at our 
neutrality, but the Southern with statesmanship and moderation has recognized in 
it all that we could do for either party; and whether with a view to our transactions 
in Mexico, or to our relations with the Cabinet at Washington, the friendly 
forbearance of the Southern Confederacy is an important point in our favor.” 

I may remark that the Nord of December 3—a Russian paper, 
and consequently a paper initiated into Palmerston’s designs— 
insinuates that the Mexican expedition was from the first set on 
foot, not for its ostensible purpose, but for a war against the 
United States.‘ 

Gen. Scott’s letter had produced such a beneficent reaction in 
public opinion, and even on the London Stock Exchange, that the 
conspirators of Downing street and the Tuileries'** found it 
necessary to let loose the Patrie, stating with all the airs of 
knowledge derived from official sources that the seizure of the 
Southern Commissioners from the Trent was directly authorized 
by the Washington Cabinet. 

Written on December 7, 1861 Reproduced from the newspaper 

Tribune, No. 6467, December 25, 1861