England in 1863--The Prince of Wales Summoned as a Peer of Parliament--His Introduction to the House of Lords--Cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece--Mr. Disraeli’s Policy--The Prince of Wales’s Income--The Dowry of the Princess--Approaching Marriage of the Prince of Wales--The Voyage of the “Sea-King’s Daughter”--Reception of the Princess Alexandra at Gravesend--Her Entry into London--The Scene in the City--The West End _en fête_--Loyalty of Clubland--Accident to the Royal Party at Slough--The High Churchmen and the Queen--Objections to a Royal Marriage in Lent--The Dispensing Power of the Primate--A Visit to Frogmore--The Queen at the Prince of Wales’s Marriage--The Scene in St. George’s Chapel--The Wedding Presents--The Ceremony--The Wedding Guests hustled by Roughs--Riots in Ireland--Illuminated London--Foreign Policy--The Polish Question--The Russian Rebuff to Lord Palmerston--Napoleon III. Proposes a Congress of Sovereigns--Lord Russell Condemns the Proposal--The Death-Knell of the Anglo-French Alliance--France and Mexico and the Archduke Maximilian. But for the controversy that was waged in the Press over the Civil War in America, and the sufferings of Lancashire, where the people were lying under the blight of the Cotton Famine, the year 1863 would have presented a record of unruffled calm. The classes and the masses still wrangled over the rights and wrongs of the Southern States; but the leaders of political parties, adhering to the policy of neutrality, discouraged all projects for interfering between the belligerents. The organs of public opinion in the Northern States bitterly condemned England because her aristocracy displayed strong Southern sympathies. The organs of public opinion in the Southern States reviled the English Government because Lord Russell refused to join the Emperor of the French in recognising the Southern Confederacy. For some mysterious reason France, whose policy was thus absolutely hostile to the Federal Government, was not only popular in the South but in the North. Both belligerents were, however, surprised to find that events falsified the anticipations which they had based on the effect of the Cotton Famine. So far from forcing England to interfere in the struggle, the destruction of her cotton industry was seen to produce local suffering rather than national disaster. The foundations of British trade, in fact, had, by the fiscal policy of Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone, been laid so broad and so deep, that the nation easily withstood the shock from the ruin of its most productive branch of manufacture. Losses in the cotton trade were more than balanced by increased gains in other forms of commercial enterprise, and on New Year’s Day the revenue had increased so unexpectedly, that Mr. Gladstone not only began to dream of surpluses, but was busy hatching projects for a fresh reduction of taxation.