Here came in the one clearly known and most certainly happy intervention of Lincoln's in foreign affairs. Early in May Seward brought to him the draft of a vehement despatch, telling the British Government peremptorily what the United States would not stand, and framed in a manner which must have frustrated any attempt by Adams in London to establish good relations with Lord John Russell. That draft now exists with the alterations made in Lincoln's own hand. With a few touches, some of them very minute, made with the skill of a master of language and of a life-long peacemaker, he changed the draft into a firm but entirely courteous despatch. In particular, instead of requiring Adams, as Seward would have done, to read the whole despatch to Russell and leave him with a copy of it, he left it to the man on the spot to convey its sense in what manner he judged best. Probably, as has been claimed for him, his few penstrokes made peaceful relations easy when Seward's despatch would have made them almost impossible; certainly a study of this document will prove both his strange, untutored diplomatic skill and the general soundness of his view of foreign affairs. 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