of their agreement, and are expected to concur with or follow them in whatever measures they adopt on the subject of recognition. The United States have been impartial and just in all their conduct towards the several nations of Europe. They will not complain, however, of the combination now announced by the two leading powers, although they think they had a right to expect a more independent, if not a more friendly course, from each of them. You will take no notice of that or any other alliance. Whenever the European governments shall see fit to communicate directly with us, we shall be, as heretofore, frank and explicit in our reply.

As to the blockade, you will say that by our own laws and the laws of nature, and the laws of nations, this government has a clear right to suppress insurrection. An exclusion of commerce from national ports which have been seized by insurgents, in the equitable form of blockade, is a proper means to that end. You will not insist that our blockade is to be respected, if it be not maintained by a competent force; but passing by that question as not now a practical or at least an urgent one, you will add that the blockade is now, and it will continue to be, so maintained, and therefore we expect it to be respected by Great Britain. You will add that we have already revoked the exequatur of a Russian consul who had enlisted in the military service of the insurgents, and we shall dismiss or demand the recall of every foreign agent, consular or diplomatic, who shall either disobey the federal laws or disown the federal authority.

As to the recognition of the so-called Southern Confederacy, it is not to be made a subject of technical definition. It is, of course, direct recognition to publish an acknowledgment of the sovereignty and independence of a new power. It is direct recognition to receive its embassadors, ministers, agents or commissioners, officially. A concession of belligerent rights is liable to be construed as a recognition of them. No one of these proceedings will pass unquestioned by the United States in this case.

Hitherto, recognition has been moved only on the assumption that the so-called Confederate States are de facto a self-sustaining power. Now, after long forbearance, designed to sooth discontent and avert the need of civil war, the land and naval forces of the United States have been put in motion to repress insurrection. The true character of the pretended new State is at once revealed. It is seen to be a power existing in pronunciamento only. It has never won a field. It has obtained no forts that were not virtually betrayed into its hands or seized in breach of trust. It commands not a single port on the coast nor any highway out from its pretended capital by land. Under these circumstances, Great Britain is called upon to intervene and give it body and independence by resisting our measures of suppression. British recognition would be British intervention, to create within our territory a hostile State by overthrowing this republic itself.

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As to the treatment of privateers in the insurgent service, you will say that this is a question exclusively our own. We treat them as pirates. They are our own citizens, or persons employed by our citizens, preying on the commerce of our country. If Great Britain shall choose to recognize them as lawful belligerents, and give them shelter from our pursuit and punishment, the laws of nations afford an adequate and proper remedy.

Happily, however, her Britannic Majesty's government can avoid all these difficulties. It invited us in 1856 to accede to the declaration of the congress of Paris, of which body Great Britain was herself a member, abolishing privateering everywhere in all cases and forever. You already have our authority to propose to her our accession to that declaration. If she refuse it, it can only be because she is willing to become the patron of privateering when aimed at our devastation.

These positions are not elaborately defended now, because to vindicate them would imply a possibility of our waiving them.

We are not insensible of the grave importance of this occasion. We see how, upon the result of the debate in which we are engaged, a war may ensue between the United States and one, two, or even more European nations. War in any case is as exceptional from the habits as it is revolting from the sentiments of the American people. But if it come it will be fully seen that it results from the action of Great Britain, not our own; that Great Britain will have decided to fraternize with our domestic enemy either without waiting to hear from you our remonstrances and our warnings, or after having heard them. War in defence of national life is not immoral, and war in defence of independence is an inevitable part of the discipline of nations.

The dispute will be between the European and the American branches of the British race. All who belong to that race will especially deprecate it, as they ought. It may well be believed that men of every race and kindred will deplore it. A war not unlike it between the same parties occurred at the close of the last century. Europe atoned by forty years of suffering for the error that Great Britain committed in provoking that contest. If that nation shall now repeat the same great error, the social convulsions which will follow may not be so long, but they will be more general. When they shall have ceased, it will, we think, be seen, whatever may have been the fortunes of other nations, that it is not the United States that will have come out of them with its precious Constitution altered, or its honestly obtained dominions in any degree abridged. Great Britain has but to wait a few months, and all her present inconveniences will cease with all our own troubles. If she take a different course she will calculate for herself the ultimate, as well as the immediate consequences, and will consider what position she will hold when she shall have forever lost the sympathies and affections of the only nation on whose sympathies and affections she has a natural claim. In making that calculation she will do well to remember that in the controversy she proposes to open we shall be actuated by neither pride, nor passion, nor cupidity, nor ambition; but we shall stand simply on the principle of self-preservation, and that our cause will involve the independence of nations and the rights of human nature.

SIR: At the close of my last despatch I stated my purpose to ask an early interview with Lord John Russell. A note to that effect was immediately sent to the foreign office. An answer was received on Saturday morning, saying that his lordship would be happy to see me, if I would take the trouble to go out to Pembroke Lodge, at Richmond, where he is retired for the present, on Monday at twelve or one o'clock, or, if I preferred it, he would see me at one o'clock on that same day, (May 18.) Although it was approaching eleven o'clock when I got the answer, and the distance exceeds

nine miles from the city, I replied by accepting the earlier appointment, and was probably myself at the Lodge before he received my note.

Be this as it may, I found his lordship ready to receive me, so that I proceeded at once to business. After expressing the general feeling which I believed prevailing in the United States of good will towards Great Britain, and the confident expectations I had entertained, down to the period of my arrival, that these sentiments were fully reciprocated to my government on the part of the government here, I signified my sense of disappointment in not finding this quite so unequivocally manifested as I had hoped. There were now fewer topics of direct difference between the two countries than had probably existed at any preceding time, and even these had been withdrawn from discussion at this place to be treated on the other side of the water. I therefore came out here with little to do beyond the duty of preserving the relations actually existing from the risk of being unfavorably affected by the unfortunate domestic disturbances prevailing in my own country. It was not without pain that I was compelled to admit that from the day of my arrival I had felt in the proceedings of both houses of Parliament, in the language of her Majesty's ministers, and in the tone of opinion prevailing in private circles, more of uncertainty about this than I had before thought possible. This sentiment alone would have impelled me to solicit an early interview; but I was now come under a much stronger motive. I had just received a despatch from my government, based upon a letter from Mr. Dallas, of much earlier date than any of the matters to which I had alluded. In that letter he had reported a conversation with his lordship, the close of which had been deemed so unsatisfactory that I had been directed at once to seek for a further elucidation of his meaning. It was the desire of my government to learn whether it was the intention of her Majesty's ministers to adopt a policy which would have the effect to widen, if not to make irreparable, a breach which we believed yet to be entirely manageable by ourselves.

At this point his lordship replied by saying that there was no such intention. The clearest evidence of that was to be found in the assurance given by him to Mr. Dallas in the earlier part of the conversation referred to. With regard to the other portion, against which I understood him to intimate he had already heard from Lord Lyons that the President had taken exception, he could only say that he hardly saw his way to bind the government to any specific course, when circumstances beyond their agency rendered it difficult to tell what might happen. Should the insurgent States ultimately succeed in establishing themselves in an independent position, of the probability of which he desired to express no opinion, he presumed, from the general course of the United States heretofore, that they did not mean to require of other countries to pledge themselves to go further than they had been in the habit of going themselves. He therefore, by what he had said to Mr. Dallas, simply meant to say that they were not disposed in any way to interfere.

To this I replied by begging leave to remark that, so far as my government was concerned, any desire to interfere had never been imputed to Great Britain; but in her peculiar position it was deserving of grave consideration whether great caution was not to be used in adopting any course that might, even in the most indirect way, have an effect to encourage the hopes of the disaffected in America. It had now come to this, that without support from here, the people of the United States considered the termination of this difficulty as almost entirely a question of time. Any course adopted here that would materially change that calculation would inevitably raise the most unpleasant feelings among them. For independently of the absolute influence of Great Britain, admitted to be great, the effect of any supposed

inclination on her part could not fail to be extensive among the other nations of Europe. It was my belief that the insurgent States could scarcely hope for sympathy on this side of the Atlantic, if deprived of any prospect of it here. Hence anything that looked like a manifestation of it would be regarded among us as inevitably tending to develope an ultimate separation in America; and, whether intended or not, the impression made would scarcely be effaced by time. It was in this view that I must be permitted to express the great regret I had felt on learning the decision to issue the Queen's proclamation, which at once raised the insurgents to the level of a belligerent State, and still more the language used in regard to it by her Majesty's ministers in both houses of Parliament before and since. Whatever might be the design, there could be no shadow of doubt that the effect of these events had been to encourage the friends of the disaffected here. The tone of the press and of private opinion indicated it strongly. I then alluded more especially to the brief report of the lord chancellor's speech on Thursday last, in which he had characterized the rebellious portion of my country as a belligerent State, and the war that was going on as justum bellum.

To this his lordship replied that he thought more stress was laid upon these events than they deserved. The fact was that a necessity seemed to exist to define the course of the government in regard to the participation of the subjects of Great Britain in the impending conflict. To that end the legal questions involved had been referred to those officers most conversant with them, and their advice had been taken in shaping the result. Their conclusion had been that, as a question merely of fact, a war existed. A considerable number of the States, at least seven, occupying a wide extent of country, were in open resistance, whilst one or more of the others were associating themselves in the same struggle, and as yet there were no indications of any other result than a contest of arms more or less severe. In many preceding cases, much less formidable demonstrations had been recognized. Under such circumstances it seemed scarcely possible to avoid speaking of this in the technical sense as justum bellum, that is, a war of two sides, without in any way implying an opinion of its justice, as well as to withhold an endeavor, so far as possible, to bring the management of it within the rules of modern civilized warfare. This was all that was contemplated by the Queen's proclamation. It was designed to show the purport of existing laws, and to explain to British subjects their liabilities in case they should engage in the war. And however strongly the people of the United States might feel against their enemies, it was hardly to be supposed that in practice they would now vary from their uniformly humane policy heretofore in endeavoring to assuage and mitigate the horrors of war.

To all which I answered that under other circumstances I should be very ready to give my cheerful assent to this view of his lordship's. But I must be permitted frankly to remark that the action taken seemed, at least to my mind, a little more rapid than was absolutely called for by the occasion. It might be recollected that the new administration had scarcely had sixty days to develop its policy; that the extent to which all departments of the gov ernment had been demoralized in the preceding administration was surely understood here, at least in part; that the very organization upon which any future action was to be predicated was to be renovated and purified before a hope could be entertained of energetic and effective labor. The conse quence had been that it was but just emerging from its difficulties, and beginning to develop the power of the country to cope with this rebellion, when the British government took the initiative, and decided practically that it is a struggle of two sides. And furthermore, it pronounced the insurgents to be a belligerent State before they had ever shown their capacity

to maintain any kind of warfare whatever, except within one of their own harbors, and under every possible advantage. It considered them a marine power before they had ever exhibited a single privateer on the ocean. I said that I was not aware that a single armed vessel had yet been issued from any port under the control of these people. Surely this was not the case in the instance which had been relied upon in his speech by his lordship as authority for the present action. There the Greeks, however small as a people, had long been actively and effectually waging war, before the interposition of Great Britain, and, to use the language of the government, as quoted by himself, had "covered the sea with cruisers." It did seem to me therefore as if a little more time might have been taken to form a more complete estimate of the relative force of the contending parties, and of the probabilities of any long drawn issue. And I did not doubt that the view taken by me would be that substantially taken both by the government and the people of the United States. They would inevitably infer the existence of an intention more or less marked to extend the struggle. For this reason it was that I made my present application to know whether such a design was or was not entertained. For in the alternative of an affirmative answer it was as well for us to know it, as I was bound to acknowledge in all frankness that in that contingency I had nothing further left to do in Great Britain. I said this with regret, as my own feelings had been and were of the most friendly nature.

His lordship replied by an assurance that he participated in those feelings; neither did he see the action that had been thus far taken at all in the light in which I saw it. He believed that the United States, in their own previous history, had furnished examples of action taken quite as early as that now complained of. He instanced two cases. The first I do not now remember, for it seemed to me not important at the time; the other was the insurrection in Hungary under Kossuth, at which period, he believed, they had gone so far as actually to send an agent to that country with a view to recognition, and that to the great dissatisfaction and against the remonstrances of Austria.

I replied only to the second case, by remarking that the incidents attending that affair were not fresh in my mind, neither was I sure that I ever knew the whole action of the government; but it was my impression that the object of the mission was only confined to the acquisition of the facts necessary to form an opinion, and that, after they were obtained, no public step of any kind had been taken. Neither could I myself recollect an instance in which ample time had not been given by the United States for the development of events sufficiently decisive to justify any action that might have followed; for I begged it to be understood that the government did not mean at all to deny that there were cases in which recognition of a revolutionary government might be both expedient and proper. The rule was clear, that whenever it became apparent that any organized form of society had advanced so far as to prove its power to defend and protect itself against the assaults of enemies, and at the same time to manifest a capacity to maintain binding relations with foreign nations, then a measure of recognition could not be justly objected to on any side. The case was very different when such an interference should take place, prior to the establishment of the proof required, as to bring about a result which would not probably have happened but for that external agency.

And here I stop for a moment to make two remarks upon this part of the conversation. The first of these is, that I have an impression that the agent to go to Hungary, alluded to by his lordship, was Mr. Mann, the same gentleman who is now figuring in the commission of the confederates at this