Thus Lincoln, because of Bright; and because of a word from Bright to Charles Sumner about the starving cotton-spinners, Americans sent from New York three ships with flour for those faithful English friends of ours.
And then, at Geneva in 1872, England paid us for what the Alabama had done. This Court of Arbitration grew slowly; suggested first by Mr. Thomas Batch to Lincoln, who thought the millennium wasn’t quite at hand but favored “airing the idea.” The idea was not aired easily. Cobden would have brought it up in Parliament, but illness and death overtook him. The idea found but few other friends. At last Horace Greeley “aired” it in his paper. On October 23, 1863, Mr. Adams said to Lord John Russell, “I am directed to say that there is no fair and equitable form of conventional arbitrament or reference to which the United States will not be willing to submit.” This, some two years later, Russell recalled, saying in reply to a statement of our grievances by Adams: “It appears to Her Majesty’s Government that there are but two questions by which the claim of compensation could be tested; the one is, Have the British Government acted with due diligence, or, in other words, in good faith and honesty, in the maintenance of the neutrality they proclaimed? The other is, Have the law officers of the Crown properly understood the foreign enlistment act, when they declined, in June 1862, to advise the detention and seizure of the Alabama, and on other occasions when they were asked to detain other ships, building or fitting in British ports? It appears to Her Majesty’s Government that neither of these questions could be put to a foreign government with any regard to the dignity and character of the British Crown and the British Nation. Her Majesty’s Government are the sole guardians of their own honor. They cannot admit that they have acted with bad faith in maintaining the neutrality they professed. The law officers of the Crown must be held to be better interpreters of a British statute than any foreign Government can be presumed to be...” He consented to a commission, but drew the line at any probing of England’s good faith.
We persisted. In 1868, Lord Westbury, Lord High Chancellor, declared in the House of Lords that “the animus with which the neutral powers acted was the only true criterion.”