In the course of the correspondence that took place at the end of 1869 it was clear that Lord Clarendon had lost all faith, if he ever had any, in his friend Louis Napoléon. In one letter he went so far as to say, “If the Emperor attaches value to the English alliance, he ought not to sacrifice it by a sneaking attempt to incorporate Belgium, by means of a railway company and its employés. If he wants war it is a bad pretext for doing that which all mankind will blame him for.” Later, on the 31st of August, he writes with prophetic instinct: “The prospect of affairs in France gives cause sufficient for anxiety, and I have an instinct that they will drift into a republic before another year is over.” Indeed, the Fates were busy with the thread of the Empire’s life. Abroad the attempts to induce Prussia to disarm pursued their gentle but ineffectual course as before. Lord Clarendon did more than even his best to try and persuade Bismarck. The man of iron and blood was polite, but unmoved. The Duc de Gramont, known in his salad days as “_le bel Agénor_,” had become Minister of Foreign Affairs, and when the thunderbolt of the Hohenzollern candidature for the throne of Spain fell in the early days of July, the ex-dandy Duke lost no time in intimating to the British Ambassador that France would go to war with both Spain and Prussia rather than allow a Hohenzollern to reign at Madrid.... “The election of Montpensier might be looked upon as a _mauvais procédé_ towards the Emperor and the dynasty, but the putting forward a Prussian was an insult and an injury to all France.” At the same time the warlike Duke gave Lord Lyons to understand that he would be grateful to England if she would use her influence with Prussia in order to bring about a solution of the difficulty. To the unspeakable sorrow of all England, and we might say of Europe, Lord Clarendon had died on the 27th of June. It now fell to the lot of Lord Granville to deal with foreign affairs. On the 6th of July, he paid a generous tribute to his predecessor when he wrote: “It is very sad that I should be writing to you in the place of one who would have had so much personal power in such a matter as this.” What I have to say of the war of 1870 and the causes which led to it must be told elsewhere; here I am dealing really with the years of the American rebellion, and have only skimmed the first volume of Lord Newton’s great book.