they have done grudgingly and imperfectly[886]." This was written at the exact period when Palmerston and Russell were initiating those steps which were to result in the Cabinet crisis on mediation in October-November, 1862.

Certainly the Slave Trade treaty with America had not influenced governmental attitude.

At this juncture there was founded, November, 1862, the London Emancipation Society, with the avowed object of stirring anti-slavery Englishmen in protest against "favouring the South." But George Thompson, its organizer, had been engaged in the preliminary work of organization for some months and the Society is therefore to be regarded as an expression of that small group who were persistent and determined in assertion of slavery as the cause and object of the Civil War, before the issue of Lincoln's proclamation[887].

Thus for England as a whole and for official England the declarations of these few voices were regarded as expressive of a wish rather than as consistent with the facts.

The moral uplift of an anti-slavery object was denied to the North.
This being so did Lincoln seek to correct the foreign view by the emancipation proclamation?
There is some, but scant ground for so believing.