ROEBUCK'S MOTION In the mid-period during which the British Government was seeking to fulfil its promise of an altered policy as regards ship-building and while the public was unaware that such a promise had been given, certain extreme friends of the South thought the time had come for renewed pressure upon the Government, looking toward recognition of the Confederacy.

The _Alexandra_ had been seized in April, but the first trial, though appealed, had gone against the Government in June, and there was no knowledge that the Ministry was determined in its stand.
From January to the end of March, 1863, the public demonstrations in approval of the emancipation proclamation had somewhat checked expressions of Southern sympathy, but by the month of June old friends had recovered their courage and a new champion of the South came forward in the person of Roebuck.
Meanwhile the activities of Southern agents and Southern friends had not ceased even if they had, for a time, adopted a less vigorous tone.

For four months after the British refusal of Napoleon's overtures on mediation, in November, 1862, the friends of the South were against "acting now," but this did not imply that they thought the cause lost or in any sense hopeless.

Publicists either neutral in attitude or even professedly sympathetic with the North could see no outcome of the Civil War save separation of North and South.

Thus the historian Freeman in the preface to the first volume of his uncompleted _History of Federal Government_, published in 1863, carefully explained that his book did not have its origin in the struggle in America, and argued that the breaking up of the Union in no way proved any inherent weakness in a federal system, but took it for granted that American reunion was impossible.