16 THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 
those gigantic proportions, which served to render it 
so costly of blood and of treasure to the whole Union, 
and so specially disastrous to the Southern States 
themselves. 
We charged and we believed that, in all this, Great 
Britain, through her Government, had disregarded 
the obligations of neutrality imposed on her by the 
law of nations to such manifest degree as to have af- 
forded to the United States just and ample cause of 
war. 
The United States, througheall these events, with 
William H. Seward, as Secretary of State, and Charles 
Francis Adams, Minister at London, had not failed to 
address continual remonstrances to the British Gov- 
ernment, demanding reparation for. past wrong and 
the cessation from continuous wrong: which remon- 
strances did, in fact, at length awaken the British 
Government to greater vigilance in the discharge of 
its international duties, but could not induce it to 
take any step toward reparation so long as Earl Rus- 
sell [then Lord John Russell], by whose negligence or 
misjudgment the injuries had happened, remained in 
charge of the foreign affairs of the Government. That 
statesman, while, on more than one occasion, expressly 
admitting the wrong done to the United States, still 
persisted, with singular obtuseness or narrowness of 
mind, in maintaining that the honor of England would 
not permit her to make any reparation to the United 
States. 
_ Never, in the history of nations, has an occasion ex- 
isted where a powerful people, smarting under the 
