when in one of his letters he rejoiced at the "exemplary good licking" which had been inflicted on the Celestials.

The quarrel between England and the United States bequeathed by Lord Palmerston to Lord Aberdeen was of a more serious nature than a little war in which the enemy frequently saved our soldiers the necessity of killing him by putting an end to his own existence. When the Conservatives came into office the two countries were engaged in a diplomatic controversy, conducted on both sides with much acrimony, and having little prospect of termination. One of the subjects at issue was connected with the war of American independence. After the conclusion of the war, the treaty of 1783 had defined the boundary between the States and Canada. But it had been drawn up on defective information, and hence left unsettled almost as many points as it had determined. For instance, the river St. Croix was to be the dividing line on the Atlantic coast. There were about a dozen rivers called St. Croix. It was supposed that a ridge of hills ran between the St. Croix and the St. Lawrence; there was no such ridge. A Commission solved the St. Croix question; the other points in dispute were referred to the King of the Netherlands, who, in 1831, made an award which Lord Palmerston agreed to accept but which was rejected by the Senate of the United States. Subsequent attempts at a compromise, among which was a characteristic proposal of Palmerston's that the disputed territory should be divided into halves between Canada and the States, came to nothing; and the dispute continued to smoulder. It is extremely difficult to form. any decided opinion on the relative merits of the rival views advanced, but as neither party was contending for

any very valuable natural frontiers, Lord Palmerston may, perhaps, have been too much inclined to stand out about trifles.

Towards the end of the Whig Ministry the question, which had chiefly been one of academic importance, began to have practical bearings. In 1837, Ebenezer Greely, an official of the State of Maine, who was engaged in making a census, was arrested by the authorities of New Brunswick, on the ground that he was conducting his operations on the wrong side of the frontier. Palmerston thought the Canadians in the right, and Greely remained in prison, until the Governor of New Brunswick set him free out of gratitude for the strict observance of neutrality by Maine during the Canadian rebellion. Far more serious than the arrest of Greely was the McLeod affair. In 1840 a Canadian named McLeod, while on a visit to the State of New York, boasted that he had taken part in the burning of the Caroline, a disreputable little American vessel which had conveyed stores during the Canadian rebellion to a promiscuous collection of border ruffians, who had established themselves on Navy Island in the Niagara river, and made common cause with the rebels. The act of destruction, which was directed by a British officer, Colonel McNab, was in itself praiseworthy. Unfortunately, as as the destruction of the Caroline took place in American waters, and several American citizens were killed during the affray, it provoked considerable and not unnatural indignation in the United States, of which Palmerston took no notice whatever. McLeod, the indiscreet, was promptly seized by the authorities of New York, thrown into prison, and charged with murder.

Lord Palmerston at once rushed to his rescue with more than his usual impetuosity. "The British nation," he

wrote forthwith to Mr. Fox, our Minister at Washington, "will never permit a British subject to be dealt with as the people of New York propose to deal with McLeod without taking a signal vengeance upon the offenders. McLeod's execution would produce war, war immediate and frightful in its character, because it would be a war of retaliation and vengeance." He also instructed Mr. Fox to demand, in the name of the British Government, the immediate release of Alexander McLeod, who had been engaged in "a transaction of a public character

an act of public duty," for which no Englishman could be made "personally and individually answerable to the laws of any foreign States." Unfortunately, this was the first occasion on which Palmerston, in spite of American remonstrances, had taken any notice whatever of the destruction of the Caroline; and Mr. Daniel Webster, the American Secretary of State, did not fail to point out the omission in his very able reply. He also scored a point off Palmerston, who had styled the crew of the Caroline "American pirates," by recalling the Carlist war and the equipment of the Spanish Legion, "for the avowed purpose," he added, rather inexactly, “of aiding a rebellion against a nation with which England was at peace. And yet it has not been imagined that England has at any time allowed her subjects to turn pirates." In fact, Palmerston found in Daniel Webster an opponent worthy of his steel. The American Secretary of State declared that the United States Government could not stop the legal proceedings begun against McLeod by the State of New York, and that the trial must take place. At the same time, while returning a stout answer to Palmerston's somewhat peremptory demands, he took care that McLeod should be well represented by counsel, and

thus succeeded in procuring his acquittal. The game had been well contested, but on the whole Webster must be allowed to have won the greater number of tricks.

There was a third subject of dispute between England and America at this time which Palmerston had far more closely at heart than the boundary or the fate of McLeod. We have mentioned his noble efforts for the suppression of the slave-trade. They were continuous and energetic; and when in 1841 he succeeded in persuading the five Powers, Great Britian, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, to sign a treaty by which they allowed one another a mutual right of search, they seemed to have been crowned with considerable success. Guizot's refusal to ratify the treaty was considered by Palmerston and rightly-to be a mere piece of spite, a counterstroke to the Quadrilateral Alliance; and far more serious was the refusal of the United States to be a party to it at all. The result was of course that slavers hoisted the American flag, and so escaped unscathed. The British tar, however, was equal to the emergency; it was true he might not search an American vessel, but surely, he contended, he might detain a vessel under an American flag to see if she really was what she professed to be. These proceedings of course produced more diplomatic correspondence of an angry character. Here Palmerston had decidedly the better of the argu

ment:

What would be the consequence [he wrote] if a vessel engaged in the slave trade could protect herself from search by merely hoisting a United States flag? Why, it is plain that in such case every slave-trading pirate, whether Spanish, Portuguese, or Brazilian, or English, or French, or of whatever nation he might be, would immediately sail under the colours of the United States; every criminal could do that, though he could not procure genuine American papers; and thus all the treaties

concluded among the Christian Powers for the suppression of slave trade could be rendered a dead letter; even the laws of England might be set aside by her own subjects, and the slave traders would be invested with complete impunity.

Everything seemed to point to a prolonged alienation between England and the United States, if not to an absolute rupture.

It was immediately after the hurling of this Palmerstonian thunderbolt that Lord Aberdeen assumed the control of our foreign relations. Under his serener influence, and through the exertions of Lord Ashburton, who was sent by the Peel Ministry on a special mission of conciliation to Washington, compromises were effected on the three points under dispute which were perhaps as satisfactory as compromises can ever be. The CarolineMcLeod affair was settled by an apology for the violation of American waters, though Lord Ashburton maintained that the burning of the vessel was in itself justifiable. With regard to the slave-trade, the United States, while declining to submit their ships to search, agreed to maintain an adequate squadron on the African coast for its suppression. The boundary question was far more difficult to handle, and though the utmost moderation and good sense was brought to bear upon it by Webster and Lord Ashburton, their final definition came in for a good deal of abuse from the "no-surrender " party on both sides of the Atlantic.

Palmerston, who was a very active member of the Opposition, set himself to work to holloa on the hounds. The treaty of Lord Ashburton, "that half-Yankee," as he calls him in one of his letters-he had married an American lady-was denounced as weak retreat before encroachment; and the member for Tiverton expressed a fear lest "the system of purchasing temporary secu