and had at last succeeded in securing a meeting of the Executive Committee when his proposed parliamentary resolution would be considered.  The Manchester Association was much more alert and ready to support him.  “The question is quite ripe for fresh agitation and from experience I find that that agitation must be started by a debate in Parliament.  No notice is taken of lectures or speeches in the provinces[1175].”

Before any move was made in Parliament letters to the newspapers began anew to urge that the Ministry should be pressed to offer mediation in America.  They met with little favourable response.  The Times, at the very end of Lindsay’s effort, explained its indifference, and recited the situation of October-November, 1862, stating that the question had then been decided once for all.  It declared that Great Britain had “no moral right to interfere” and added that to attempt to do so would result in filling “the North with the same spirit of patriotism and defiance as animated the invaded Confederates[1176].”  Thus support to Lindsay was lacking in a hoped-for quarter, but his conferences with Association members had brought a plan of modified action the essential feature of which was that the parliamentary motion must not be made a party one and that the only hope of the South lay in the existing Government.  This was decidedly Lindsay’s own view though it was clearly understood that the opportuneness of the motion lay in ministerial desire for and need of support in its Danish policy.  Lindsay expected to find Palmerston more complaisant than formerly as regards American policy and was not disappointed.  He wrote to Mason on May 27: 

“I received in due course your note of the 23rd.  In a matter of so much importance I shall make no move in the House in regard to American affairs without grave consideration.  I am therefore privately consulting the friends of the South.  On this subject we had a meeting of our lifeless association on Monday last and on the same subject we are to have another meeting next Monday; but differences of opinion exist there as well as elsewhere, as to the advisability of moving at present.  Some say ’move’—­others, ’postpone’—­but the news by the Scotia to-morrow will regulate to a considerable extent our course of action.  One thing is now clear to me that the motion must not be a party one, and that the main point will be to get the Government to go with whoever brings forward the motion, for as you are aware I would rather see the motion in other hands than mine, as my views on the American question are so well known.  As no competent member however seems disposed to move or rather to incur the responsibility, I sent to inquire if it would be agreeable to Lord Palmerston to see me on American affairs and on the subject of a motion to be brought forward in the House.  He sent word that he would be very glad to see me, and I had, therefore,