living. At all events, she is reported to have flatly stated to her minister:
"My Lord, you must understand that I shall sign no paper which means war with the United States."
Consequently our anxious diplomats in their outposts of the drama at Paris believed that the crisis had been averted, when the sudden entry of this Gascon informer from the offices of the ship-builder Arman disclosed a plot of the first magnitude hatching under their noses.
One thing was certain. The American consul had to stop these ships from sailing, no matter who was behind them, and no matter how he did it. Little things like this, hardly known by the public and ignored by those who see in a diplomat only a favoured plum-gatherer with a tinsel hat and a fancy tea room, are frequently put up to our representatives abroad.
If this revelation exposed merely a Confederate plot, and a shipyard working under cover of the false pretences that its vessels were
