The law officers of the Crown’ had yesterday to give their 
opinion on the naval incident in the Bahama Channel.? Their 
records of the case consisted of the written reports of the British 
officers who have remained on board the Trent and of the oral 
testimony of Commodore Williams, who was on board the Trent as 
Admiralty agent, but disembarked from the steamer La Plata on 
November 27 at Southampton, whence he was immediately 
summoned by telegraph to London. The law officers of the Crown 
acknowledged the right of the San Jacinto to visit and search the 
Trent. Since Queen Victoria’s proclamation of neutrality on the 
outbreak of the American Civil War‘ expressly lists dispatches 
among articles of contraband,’ there could be no doubt on this 
point either. There remained, then, the question whether Messrs. 
Mason, Slidell and Co. were themselves contraband and therefore 
confiscable. The law officers of the Crown appear to hold this 
view, for they have dropped the material legal question entirely. 
According to the report of The Times,’ their opinion blames the 
commander of the San Jacinto! only for an error in procedure. 
Instead of Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co., he should have taken 
No. 24103, November 29, 1861, leading article.— Ed. 
the Trent herself in tow as a prize, brought her to the nearest 
American port and there submitted her to the judgment of a 
North American prize court.''! This is incontestably the procedure 
corresponding to British and therefore to North American 
maritime law. 

It is equally incontestable that the British frequently violated this 
rule during the anti-Jacobin war and proceeded in the summary 
fashion of the San Jacinto. However that may be, the whole conflict 
is reduced by this opinion of the law officers of the Crown to a 
technical error and consequently deprived of any immediate 
import. Two circumstances make it easy for the Union govern- 
ment to accept this point of view and therefore to afford formal 
satisfaction. In the first place, Captain Wilkes, the commander of 
the San Jacinto, could have received no direct instructions from 
Washington. On the voyage home from Africa to New York, he 
called on November 2 at Havana, which. he left again on 
November 4, whilst his encounter with the Trent took place on the 
high seas on November 8. Captain Wilkes’s stay of only two days 
in Havana did not permit any exchange of notes between him and 
his government. The consul of the Union was the only American 
authority with whom he could deal. In the second place, however, 
he had obviously lost his head, as his failure to insist on the 
surrender of the dispatches proves. 

The importance of the incident lies in its moral effect on the 
English people and in the political capital that can easily be made 
out of it by the British cotton friends of secession. Characteristic of 
the latter is the Liverpool protest meeting organised by them and 
previously mentioned by me. The meeting took place on 
November 27 at three in the afternoon, in the cotton auction- 
rooms of the Liverpool Exchange, an hour after the alarming 
telegram from Southampton had arrived. 

After vain attempts to press the chairmanship on Mr. Cunard, 
the owner of the Cunard steamships laying between Liverpool and 
New York, and other high trade officials, a young merchant 
named Spence, notorious for a work he wrote in support of the 
slave republic,© took the chair. Contrary to the rules of English 
meetings, he, the chairman, himself proposed the motion to 

“call upon the government to assert the dignity of the British flag by requiring 
prompt reparation for this outrage’’.4 
d “Liverpool, Wednesday”, The Times, No. 24102, November 28, 1861.— Ed. 
Tremendous applause, clapping and cheers upon cheers! The 
main argument of the opening speaker for the slave republic was 
that slave ships had hitherto been protected by the American flag 
from the right of search claimed by Britain. And then this 
philanthropist launched a furious attack on the slave trade! He 
admitted that England had brought about the war of 1812-14 with 
the United States by insisting on searching Union warships for 
deserters from the British Navy. 

“But,” he continued with wonderful dialectic, “there is a difference between the 
right of search to recover deserters from the British Navy and the right to seize 

passengers, like Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell, men of the highest respectability, 
regardless of the fact that they were protected by the British flag!” 

He played his highest trump, however, at the close of his 
diatribe. 

“The other day,” he bellowed, “while I was on the European Continent, I 
heard observations made as to our conduct in regard to the United States which 
made me blush. What is the feeling of every intelligent man upon the Continent? 
That we would slavishly submit to any outrage and suffer every indignity offered 
to us by the Government of the United States. What could I reply to this? I could 
only blush. But the pitcher goes so often to the well that it is broken at last. Our 
patience had been exercised long enough—as long as it was possible to control it. 
At last we have arrived at facts [!]: this is a very hard and startling fact [!] and it is 
the duty of every Englishman to apprise the Government of how strong and 
unanimous is the feeling of this great community of the outrage offered to our 
flag.” 

This senseless rigmarole was greeted with a peal of applause. 
Opposing voices were howled down and hissed down and stamped 
down. To the remark of a Mr. Campbell that the whole meeting 
was “irregular”, the inexorable Spence replied: “So may it be, but 
the fact that we have met to consider is rather an irregular fact.” 
To the proposal of a Mr. Turner to adjourn the meeting to the 
following day, in order that “the city of Liverpool can have its say 
and not a clique of cotton brokers usurp its name”, cries of 
“Collar him, throw him out!” resounded from all sides. Unper- 
turbed, Mr. Turner repeated his motion, which, however, was not 
put to the vote, again contrary to all the rules of English meetings. 
Spence triumphed. But, as a matter of fact, nothing has done 
more to cool London’s temper than the news of Mr. Spence’s 
triumph.