Meanwhile, Mason had been accorded by the British upper classes
that generous welcome which they have always extended to the
representative, of a people fighting gallantly against odds.
During the hopeful days of 1862--that Golden Age of
Confederacy--Mason, though not recognized by the English
Government, was shown every kindness by leading members of the
aristocracy, who visited him in London and received him at their
houses in the country. It was during this period of buoyant hope
that the Alabama was allowed to go to sea from Liverpool in July,
1862. At the same time Mason heard his hosts express undisguised
admiration for the valor of the soldiers serving under Jackson
and Lee. Whether he formed any true impression of the other side
of British idealism, its resolute opposition to slavery, may be
questioned. There seems little doubt that he did not perceive the
turning of the tide of English public opinion, in the autumn of
1862, following the Emancipation Proclamation and the great
reverses of September and October--Antietam-Sharpsburg,
Perryville, Corinth--the backflow of all three of the Confederate
offensives.

The cotton famine in England, where perhaps a million people were
in actual want through the shutting down of cotton mills, seemed
to Mason to be "looming up in fearful proportions." "The public
mind," he wrote home in November, 1862, "is very much disturbed
by the prospect for the winter; and I am not without hope that it
will produce its effects on the councils of the government." Yet
it was the uprising of the British working people in favor of the
North that contributed to defeat the one important attempt to
intervene in American affairs. Napoleon III had made an offer of
mediation which was rejected by the Washington Government early