Then, in another letter, he controverted Mr. Seward’s statements that the Confederate envoys made the _Trent_ a good prize that might have been lawfully condemned. Of course no settlement of this question was reached, but whether Lord Russell or Mr. Seward was right, may be, perhaps, decided by the reader. At this writing there is trouble between Spain and the people of Cuba. If a Cuban agent escaped from Cuba to the United States and sailed from New York in an American liner for England, would the government of the United States permit a Spanish warship to carry the Yankee liner to Spain and there have her condemned as a prize? As this question must be answered in the negative, it is impossible to resist saying that in the _Trent_ case the British government, instead of showing a spirit hostile toward the American government, was, in spite of the time limit, forbearing. No direct reference to the British threat of war has been made so far, nor has the policy of adding to one’s enemies, when one is already full of trouble, been mentioned. It was a question of right and wrong. If, on sober second thought, the whole American people had concluded that they were right, or if it had been manifest that it was necessary for the life of the nation to keep those Confederates, no threat of war and no attack from any nation would have taken them from Fort Warren. It is an idle speculation; but most writers on this subject are sure that if Mason and Slidell had not been liberated the British would have declared war against us and so have set up the Confederate States as an independent government. But if the writer hereof may be allowed to express an opinion, he must say that, in spite of the seven days’ limit, England was not quite ready to declare war. And it is by no means certain that if she had done so, the combination would have resulted as predicted. For the people of the United States were not in their last ditch, nor were they friendless in the world. If one other point in this controversy be considered, the patriotic American can look upon the _Trent_ case with unmixed pleasure. From 1783 until 1861--for seventy-eight weary years the American government had vainly striven with all the arts of diplomacy, and even with the argument of open war, to get from Great Britain a disavowal of her assumed right to search a neutral ship in time of war and take from it any persons whom one of her naval officers might decide to be British subjects--a renunciation of what the Prince Regent (afterward George IV) proclaimed at the palace of Westminster, in 1813, as the “_undoubted_ and _hitherto undisputed_ right of searching merchant vessels in time of war, and the impressment of British seamen when found therein.”