William Ewart Gladstone rose early on the morning of October 7, 1862 and made an entry in his diary.--"Reflected further on what I should say on Lancashire and America, for both these subjects are critical." That evening at dinner he deliberately pronounced:

"We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than either, they have made a nation."

Gladstone was Chancellor of the Excequer. As Henry Adams, the precocious young son of the American Minister to London, put it, "If in the domain of the world's politics, one point was fixed, one value ascertained, one element serious, it was the British Exchequer, and if one man lived who could be certainly counted as sane . . . it was the man who had in charge the finances of England . . ." Yet in the frenzied undercover drama that took place in the British capital during the years of the American Civil War, no character was made more of a monkey than the Chancellor of the English Exchequer.

It was a frenzied drama. Russell and Palmerston plotting behind Minister Adams's back; Minister Adams sensing it, yet soothing the jangled feelings of Secretary of State Seward with optimistic dispatches. Without Minister Adam's consummate statecraft the United States of America might never have emerged from the Civil strife. There could have been war with England as well as with the rebellious South. Once, when Earl Russell assured Adams that there would be no intervention, that England's policy would remain unchanged, Adams was unaware that a few hours previously Russell had proposed intervention to a cabinet which rejected his proposal. Henry Adams records that although the Minister never thought Earl Russell was a liar, he had to act as though he were.

At all events, the falling of the curtain found the United States victor in its internecine war and still in friendly relations with Great Britain. Most of the issues of that day,--neutral rights, the Alabama Affair, the fishery controversy, the Fenian Brotherhood, expatriation and naturalization,--had been forgotten when in 1896 William Ewart Gladstone published his confessions:

'I have yet to record an undoubted error . . . I declared in the heat of the American struggle that Jefferson Davis had made a nation . . . I did not perceive the gross impropriety of such an utterance from a Cabinet Minister of a power allied in blood and language and bound to loyal neutrality . . ."

At 11 o'clock today in Harvard 1, Professor J. P. Baxter lectures on, "British Opinion on the American Civil War". This is the first of a series that will include (on December 14) "Neutral Rights in the American Civil War", (on December 16) "The Confederate Cruisers", and (on December 18) "France and the American Civil War".