be now made simultaneously in Paris and London.  Thouvenel, not at all enthusiastic over Slidell’s proposals, told him that this was at least a prerequisite, and on July 23, Slidell wrote Mason the demand should be made at once[710].  Mason, on the advice of Lindsay, Fitzgerald, and Lord Malmesbury, had already prepared a request for recognition, but had deferred making it after listening to the debate of July 18[711].  Now, on July 24, he addressed Russell referring to their interview of February, 1862, in which he had urged the claims of the Confederacy to recognition and again presented them, asserting that the subsequent failure of Northern campaigns had demonstrated the power of the South to maintain its independence.  The South, he wrote, asked neither aid nor intervention; it merely desired recognition and continuation of British neutrality[712].  On the same day Mason also asked for an interview[713], but received no reply until July 31, when Russell wrote that no definite answer could be sent until “after a Cabinet” and that an interview did not seem necessary[714].

This answer clearly indicates that the Government was in uncertainty.  It is significant that Russell took this moment to reply at last to Seward’s protestations of May 28[715], which had been presented to him by Adams on June 20.  He instructed Stuart at Washington that his delay had been due to a “waiting for military events,” but that these had been indecisive.  He gave a resume of all the sins of the North as a belligerent and wrote in a distinctly captious spirit.  Yet these sins had not “induced Her Majesty’s Government to swerve an inch from an impartial neutrality[716].”  Here was no promise of a continuance of neutrality—­rather a hint of some coming change.  At least one member of the Cabinet was very ready for it.  Gladstone wrote privately: 

“It is indeed much to be desired that this bloody and purposeless conflict should cease.  From the first it has been plain enough that the whole question was whether the South was earnest and united.  That has now for some months been demonstrated; and the fact thus established at once places the question beyond the region even of the most brilliant military successes[717]....”

Gladstone was primarily influenced by the British commercial situation.  Lyons, still in England, and a consistent opponent of a change of policy, feared this commercial influence.  He wrote to Stuart: 

     “...I can hardly anticipate any circumstances under which I
     should think the intervention of England in the quarrel
     between the North and South advisable....