Now, for our Government and Parliament. I will admit at once, if you please, that Lord Palmerston and the principal members of his Cabinet were not friendly to you, and would have been glad to have seen your Republic broken up. I am by no means sure that it was so; but let that pass. I was not in their counsels, and have no more means of judging of them than are open to all of you. Your first accusation against us is, that the Queen’s proclamation of neutrality, which was signed and published on the 13th of May 1861, was premature, and an act of discourtesy to your Government, inasmuch as your new Minister, Mr. Adams, only arrived in England on that very day. Well, looking back from this distance of time, I quite admit that it would have been far better to have delayed the publication of the proclamation till after he had arrived in London. But at the time the case was very different. You must remember that news of the President’s proclamation of the blockade reached London on 3rd May. Of course, from that moment the danger of collision between our vessels and yours, and of the fitting out of privateers in our harbours, arose at once. In fact, your first capture of a British vessel, the _General Parkhill_ of Liverpool, was made on 12th May. But if the publication of the proclamation of neutrality was a mistake, it was made by our Government at the earnest solicitation of Mr. Forster and other warm friends of yours, who pressed it forward entirely, as they supposed, in your interest. They wanted to stop letters of marque and to legitimise the captures made by your blockading squadron. The Government acted at their instance; so, whether a blunder or not, the proclamation was not an unfriendly act. Besides, remember what it amounted to. Simply and solely to a recognition of the fact that you had a serious war on hand. Mr. Seward had already admitted this in an official paper of the 4th of May, and your Supreme Court decided, in the case of the _Amy Warwick_, that the proclamation of blockade was in itself conclusive evidence that a state of war existed at the time. If we had ever gone a step further--if we had recognised the independence of the rebel States, as our Government was strongly urged to do by their envoys, by members of our Parliament, and lastly by the Emperor of the French--you would have had good ground of offence. But this was precisely what we never would do; and when they found this out, the Confederate Government cut off all intercourse with England, and expelled our consuls from their towns. So one side blamed us for doing too much, and the other for doing too little--the frequent fate of neutrals, as you yourselves are finding at this moment in the case of the war between Prussia and France.