Meanwhile the Government of Great Britain, from the very first appearance of the cloud of civil war, had focused its attention on the point of what the events in America portended to British interests and policy.

This is the business of governments, and their agents would be condemned as inefficient did they neglect it.

But did British governmental policy go beyond this entirely justifiable first thought for immediate British interests to the point of positive hope that England would find an advantage in the breaking up of the great American Republic?
American opinion, both then and later, believed Great Britain guilty of this offence, but such criticism was tinged with the passions of the Civil War.

Yet a more impartial critic, though possibly an unfriendly one because of his official position, made emphatic declaration to like effect.

On January 1, 1861, Baron de Brunow, Russian Ambassador at London, reported to St.Petersburg that, "the English Government, at the bottom of its heart, desires the separation of North America into two republics, which will watch each other jealously and counterbalance one the other.