in point of consistency.  Our mistake is that we are donning ourselves in her cast-off suit, when our own is better worth wearing[443].”  His secretarial son was more vehement:  “Angry and hateful as I am of Great Britain, I still can’t help laughing and cursing at the same time as I see the accounts of the talk of our people.  What a bloody set of fools they are!  How in the name of all that’s conceivable could you suppose that England would sit quiet under such an insult. We should have jumped out of our boots at such a one[444].”

The British Cabinet members were divided in sentiments of hope or pessimism as to the outcome, and were increasingly anxious for an honourable escape from a possible situation in which, if they trusted the observations of Lyons, they might find themselves aiding a slave as against a free State.  On November 29, Lyons had written a long account of the changes taking place in Northern feeling as regards slavery.  He thought it very probable that the issue of emancipation would soon be forced upon Lincoln, and that the American conflict would then take on a new and more ideal character[445].  This letter, arriving in the midst of uncertainty about the Trent solution, was in line with news published in the British papers calling out editorials from them largely in disapproval[446].  Certainly Russell was averse to war.  If the prisoners were not given up, what, he asked, ought England then to do?  Would it be wise to delay hostilities or to begin them at once?

“An early resort to hostilities will enable us at once to raise the blockade of the South, to blockade the North, and to prevent the egress of numerous ships, commissioned as privateers which will be sent against our commerce.”  But then, there was Canada, at present not defensible.  He had been reading Alison on the War of 1812, and found that then the American army of invasion had numbered but 2,500 men.  “We may now expect 40 or 50,000[447].”  Two days later he wrote to Gladstone that if America would only “let the Commissioners free to go where they pleased,” he would be satisfied.  He added that in that case, “I should be very glad to make a treaty with the U.S., giving up our pretensions of 1812 and securing immunity to persons not in arms on board neutral vessels or to persons going bona fide from one neutral port to another.  This would be a triumph to the U.S. in principle while the particular case would be decided in our favour[448].”

On Saturday, December 14, the Prince Consort died.  It was well-known that he had long been a brake upon the wheel of Palmerston’s foreign policy and, to the initiated, his last effort in this direction—­the modification of the instruction to Lyons on the Trent—­was no secret.  There is no evidence that his death made any change in the British position, but it was true, as the American Minister wrote, that “Now they [the British public] are beginning to open their eyes to a sense of his value.  They discover that