He wrote to Lyons: "I do not want to pick a quarrel out of our many just causes of complaint.

But it will be as well that Lincoln and Seward should see that we are long patient, and do nothing to distract their attention from the arduous task they have so wantonly undertaken[1209]." Lyons was equally desirous of avoiding frictions.

In August he thought that the current of political opinion was running against the re-election of Lincoln, noting that the Northern papers were full of expressions favouring an armistice, but pointed out that neither the "peace party" nor the advocates of an armistice ever talked of any solution of the war save on the basis of re-union.

Hence Lyons strongly advised that "the quieter England and France were just at this moment the better[1210]." Even the suggested armistice was not thought of, he stated, as extending to a relaxation of the blockade.

Of military probabilities, Lyons professed himself to be no judge, but throughout all his letters there now ran, as for some time previously, a note of warning as to the great power and high determination of the North.
But if the British Government was now quietly operating upon the theory of an ultimate Northern victory, or at least with the view that the only hope for the South lay in a Northern weariness of war, the leading British newspapers were still indulging in expressions of confidence in the South while at the same time putting much faith in the expected defeat of Lincoln at the polls.