The result is in the highest degree satisfactory. I need not add my testimony to the general tribute of admiration of he skillful manner in which the various difficulties and complications attending this unfortunate business have been met or avoided. Thus far in spite of all efforts sedulusly made to the contrary the effect on the public opinion has been favorable. The publication of the foreing correspondence during the past season as well as of the latest dispatches has materially corrected the old notion of determined hostility on your part to Great Britain which has been used so mischievously for months past. On the whole I think I may say with confidence that matters look better.

Last Saturday I called at the request of Lord Russell at the foreign office, when his lordship read to me the dispatch which he was then on the point of sending off to Lord Lyons. We thereupon exchanged congratulations on the complete restoration of friendly relations between the two coutries. Since that time not only the correspondence already published in America has been printed by authority in the London Gazette, but he later papers written on this side including the very last being that which was read to me.

You will doubtless notice with some curiosity the earlier one, being Lord Russell's note* of the substance of the conversation held with me on the 19th ultimo at the time I read to him your confindential dispatch to me of the 30th of November. # The circumstances attending that affair have given rise to so much speculation both here and on the continent, and have led to such sharp controversy in the London newspaper that it may be advisable that the Government should understanc thme correctly.

Considering the paper as confidential of course I took good care that no knowledge of its substance or of the substance of the conference should be extended beyond the limits of this legation. Yet the fact is certain that on the strength of an impressience of some such event the funds rose 1 per cent. on the very next day. So general was idea that the Morning Post, a paper considered here and not without reason as deriving information from high sources, thought proper to notice the rumor on the 21st of December and deliberately to affirm that thourgh a dispatch had indeed been communicated yet that it had reference to other unimportant matters and in no way related to the difficulty about the Trent. Some days later, however, in a summary of the events relationg to that case published in the Observer, a weekly paper published on Sunday morning, supposed also to be now and then supplied with authentic information, I noticed at the conlusion a tolerably correct version of the substance of that dispatch. After the appearance of that I had no hesitation in disclosing to persons with whom I conversed my knowledge of its correctness.

It was then with no little surprise that they perceived last week when intelligence was received from America of the existence of such a paper a formal denial in the Pors that any such paper had ever been communicated to the British Government. No longer able to deny the existence of it the next step was to affirm that I must have suppressed it. And not satisfied with that the same press went on to supply a motive for doing so in the fact that certain American parties had about the same time appeared in the market buying up stock, which was the cause of the rise in the funds already alluded to. Of course the insinnation was that I was engaged in a heavy stock-jobbing operation for

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* See Russell to Lyons, December 19, p. 1133.

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# See Seward to Adams, November 30, p. 1108.