He foresaw that this would long be the basis of American bitterness.

But Palmerston was undoubtedly correct in characterizing Bright's opinion as a "solitary one." And looked at from a distance of time it would seem that a British Government, impressed as it was with a sense of Seward's unfriendliness, which had not prepared for war when making so strong a demand for reparation, would have merited the heaviest condemnation.

If Mill was right in stating that the demand for reparation was a necessity, then so also were the military preparations.
Upon the Government the _Trent_ acted to bring to a head and make more clear the British relation to the Civil War in America.

By November, 1861, the policy of strict neutrality adopted in May, had begun to be weakened for various reasons already recited--weakened not to the point of any Cabinet member's advocacy of change, but in a restlessness at the slow development of a solution in America.

Russell was beginning to _think_, at least, of recognition of the Confederacy.