Now, however, followed a graver crisis in which his action requires some discussion.  Messrs. Mason and Slidell were sent by the Confederate Government as their emissaries to England and France.  They got to Havana and there took ship again on the British steamer Trent.  A watchful Northern sea captain overhauled the Trent, took Mason and Slidell off her, and let her go.  If he had taken the course, far more inconvenient to the Trent, of bringing her into a Northern harbour, where a Northern Prize Court might have adjudged these gentlemen to be bearers of enemy despatches, he would have been within the law.  As it was he violated well-established usage, and no one has questioned the right and even the duty of the British Government to demand the release of the prisoners.  This they did in a note of which the expression was made milder by the wish of the Queen (conveyed in almost the last letter of the Prince Consort), but which required compliance within a fortnight.  Meanwhile Secretary Welles had approved the sea captain’s action.  The North was jubilant at the capture, the more so because Mason and Slidell were Southern statesmen of the lower type and held to be specially obnoxious; and the House of Representatives, to make matters worse, voted its approval of what had been done.  Lincoln, on the very day when the news of the capture came, had seen and said privately that on the principles which America had itself upheld in the past the prisoners would have to be given up with an apology.  But there is evidence that he now wavered, and that, bent as he was on maintaining a united North, he was still too distrustful of his own better judgment as against that of the public.  At this very time he was already on other points in painful conflict with many friends.  In any case he submitted to Seward a draft despatch making the ill-judged proposal of arbitration.  He gave way to Seward, but at the Cabinet meeting on Christmas Eve, at which Seward submitted a despatch yielding to the British demand, it is reported that Lincoln, as well as Chase and others, was at first reluctant to agree, and that it was Bates and Seward that persuaded the Cabinet to a just and necessary surrender.

This was the last time that there was serious friction in the actual intercourse of the two Governments.  The lapse of Great Britain in allowing the famous Alabama to sail was due to delay and misadventure ("week-ends” or the like) in the proceedings of subordinate officials, and was never defended, and the numerous minor controversies that arose, as well as the standing disagreement as to the law of blockade never reached the point of danger.  For all this great credit was due to Lord Lyons and to C. F. Adams, and to Seward also, when he had a little sobered down, but it might seem as if the credit commonly given to Lincoln by Americans rested on little but the single happy performance with the earlier despatch which has been mentioned.  Adams and