The Trent affair brought matters to a sobering climax.* When it was settled, resentment lingered, but the tension was never again so acute. Both Great Britain and in Canada the normal sympathy with the cause of the Union revived as the war went on. In England the classes continued to be pro-Southern in sympathy, but the masses, in spite of cotton famines, held resolutely to their faith in the cause of freedom. After Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves, the view of the English middle classes more and more became the view of the nation. In Canada, pro-Southern sentiment was strong in the same classes and particularly in Montreal and Toronto, where there were to be found many Southern refugees, some of whom made a poor return for hospitality by endeavoring to use Canada as a base for border raids. Yet in the smaller towns and in the country sympathy was decidedly on the other side, particularly after the "Herald" had ceased its campaign of bluster and after Lincoln's proclamation had brought the moral issue again to the fore. The fact that a large number of Canadians, popularly set at forty thousand, enlisted in the Northern armies, is to be explained in part by the call of adventure and the lure of high bounties, but it must also be taken to reflect the sympathy of the mass of the people. * See "Abraham Lincoln and the Union", by Nathaniel W. Stephenson (in "The Chronicles of America"). In the United States resentment was slower in passing. While the war was on, prudence forbade any overt act. When it was over, the bill for the Alabama raids and the taunts of the "Times" came in. Great Britain paid in the settlement of the Alabama claims.* Canada suffered by the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty at the first possible date, and by the connivance of the American authorities in the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870. Yet for Canada the outcome was by no means ill. If the Civil War did not bring forth a new nation in the South, it helped to make one in the far North. A common danger drew the scattered British Provinces together and made ready the way for the coming Dominion of Canada. *See "The Day of the Confederacy", by Nathaniel W. Stephenson; and "The Path of Empire" (in "The Chronicles of America"). It was not from the United States alone that an impetus came for the closer union of the British Provinces. The same period and the same events ripened opinion in the United Kingdom in favor of some practical means of altering a colonial relationship which had ceased to bring profit but which had not ceased to be a burden of responsibility and risk.