Before the despatch was sent off, on the 30th of November, it was sent for approval to the Queen. Her Majesty was constantly in the habit of amending Lord Russell’s despatches, always rather slipshod affairs, and often couched in offensive language. She never did so with greater effect than upon this occasion when, acting upon the suggestions of that most sagacious adviser, the Prince Consort, written at a moment when, as he himself said, he was so ill that “he could hardly hold the pen,” she so toned down such expressions as might have wounded the sensitive feelings of the United States that the despatch, when it was received by Mr. Seward, raised no dissatisfaction, and that he “handsomely acknowledged the great consideration which had been shown by Lord Lyons in his conduct of the negotiations.” In their deep sorrow it must have been a happy memory for the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and his brothers and sisters to feel that the last official act of the husband and father whom they loved and venerated, on the eve of his entering into that peace which passeth all understanding,[28] should have been largely the means of preventing what would have been a tragedy indeed. It was a peace which was “a victory no less renowned than war.” Mr. Seward’s answer to the British despatch was a note “of the most portentous length, abounding in exuberant dialectics, but the gist of which was contained in the two following short paragraphs: “‘The four persons in question are now held in military custody at Fort Warren, in the State of Massachusetts. They will be cheerfully liberated. “‘Your lordship will please indicate a time and place for receiving them.’” The rest of the note might as well have been left unwritten. Messrs. Mason and Slidell were accordingly conveyed in an American ship from Fort Warren to Province Town, and there embarked on a British warship for Halifax, it having been expressly stipulated that the transfer should not take place at night. From Halifax they proceeded to Europe. The affair ended even better than Lord Lyons had hoped. On the 19th of December he wrote: “I don’t think it likely they will give in, but I do not think it impossible that they may do so;” and to the very end he was preparing for the worst. All the greater must have been the relief when, on the 27th, Mr. Seward’s answer came. “The Americans,” he writes on the 31st of December, “are putting the best face they can upon the surrender of Slidell and Mason, and as far as depended upon me I have done everything to make the pill as easy to swallow as possible. But I cannot disguise from myself that the real cause of the yielding was nothing more or less than the military preparations made in England.” Coming from him, these words sound like a warning, profitable, if we would but listen, even in these days.