brooding, and in fact stamps the offer as part of that friendly policy toward Europe which Lincoln had insisted upon.  Seward’s frenzy for a foreign war did not come to a head until the news had been received of England’s determination to recognize Southern belligerency.  This was in the second week of May and on the twenty-first Despatch No. 10 marked the decline, not the beginning, of a belligerent policy, and by the President’s orders.  By May 24 probably, by the twenty-seventh certainly, Seward had yielded and was rapidly beginning to turn to expressions of friendship[272].  Yet it was only on May 18 that Russell’s first instructions to Lyons were sent, and not until late in June that the “misunderstanding” cleared away, instructions were despatched by Seward to push the Declaration of Paris negotiations at London and Paris.  The battle of Bull Run had nothing to do with a new policy.  Thus chronology forbids the inclusion of this negotiation, either in its inception, progress, or conclusion, as an agency intended to make possible, on just grounds, a foreign war.

A mere chronological examination of documents, both printed and in archives, permits a clearer view of British policy on the Declaration of Paris.  Recalling the facts of the American situation known in London it will be remembered that on May 1 the British Government and Parliament became aware that a civil war was inevitable and that the South planned to issue privateers.  On that day Russell asked the Admiralty to reinforce the British fleet in West Indian waters that British commerce might be adequately protected.  Five days later, May 6, he announced in the Commons that Great Britain must be strictly neutral, and that a policy of close harmony with France was being matured; and on this day he proposed through Cowley, in Paris, that Great Britain and France each ask both the contending parties in America to abide by the second and third articles of the Declaration of Paris[273].  If there was ulterior motive here it does not appear in any despatch either then or later, passing between any of the British diplomats concerned—­Russell, Cowley, and Lyons.  The plain fact was that the United States was not an adherent to the Declaration, that the South had announced privateering, and the North a blockade, and that the only portions of the Declaration in regard to which the belligerents had as yet made no statement were the second and third articles.

It was, indeed, an anxious time for the British Government.  On May 9 Forster asked in the Commons what would be the Government’s attitude toward a British subject serving on a Southern privateer[274].  The next day in the Lords there occurred a debate the general burden of which was that privateering was in fact piracy, but that under the conditions of the American previous stand, it could not be treated as such[275].  Both in the Commons and the Lords speakers were referred to the forthcoming Proclamation of Neutrality, but