" There were more than a dozen, a good many more, as we know from Charles and Henry Adams.

But read once again the last paragraph of Beecher's letter, and note how it corresponds with what Mr.Bigelow says about the feeling which our Government (for thirty years "in the hands or under the influence of Southern statesmen") had raised against us by its bad manners to European governments.

This was the harvest sown by shirt sleeves diplomacy and reaped by Mr.Adams in 1861.

Only seven years before, we had gratuitously offended four countries at once.

Three of our foreign ministers (two of them from the South) had met at Ostend and later at Aix in the interests of extending slavery, and there, in a joint manifesto, had ordered Spain to sell us Cuba, or we would take Cuba by force.