Again he writes to Mr. Saward:
“I sail per Scotia on Wednesday, the 8th of October, and expect to arrive at Liverpool Saturday, the 18th, and get to London the same evening.
“If agreeable to you, I will call at your house Sunday morning, go with you to hear the Rev. Mr. Spurgeon preach, and dine with you at two o’clock.
“Monday morning, October 20th, I hope that we will be ready to go to work in earnest, and have all of the stock for a new cable subscribed within one month, and our other arrangements so perfected that I can at an early day return to my family and country.”
He never lost sight of an opportunity for helping his country. On November 1st Lord Shaftesbury thanks him for the “documents” he had sent to him. On November 25th his friend the Hon. Stewart Wortley writes:
“Mr. Gladstone has fixed twelve o’clock to-morrow, in Carlton House Terrace. I have promised him that we would not ask him for anything, but that I believed you had some confidential communication to give him on the views of your government. Till I told him this he was very unwilling to listen to anything that was not contained in a written proposal.”
It was on this day or the next that Mr. Field gave to Mr. Gladstone to read Thirteen Months in a Rebel Prison. Mr. McCarthy, in his History of Our Own Times, says: “It was Mr. Gladstone who said that the President of the Southern Confederation, Mr. Jefferson Davis, had made an army, had made a navy, and, more than that, had made a nation.”
It was this sentiment that its author developed in the deeply interesting correspondence which follows. This correspondence is of the utmost value as elucidating the state of mind of the liberal Englishmen from whom this country expected the sympathy it in so many cases failed to receive, and very notably failed to receive from the statesman who for more than a generation has been their intellectual and Parliamentary leader.
“11 Carlton House Terrace,
“November 27, 1862.