mutually shook the stage thunder of verbal extravagance, but
probably neither intended war. Poker was at this time the
national American game, and bluff was a highly developed art. The
American player won a partial victory. In 1856 Great Britain
agreed to withdraw her protectorate over the Mosquitoes, to
acknowledge the supremacy of Honduras over the Bay Islands, and
to accept a reasonable interpretation of the Belize boundary.
Though this convention was never ratified, Great Britain carried
out its terms, and in 1860 Buchanan announced himself satisfied.

The dreams of 1850, however, were not satisfied. A railroad was
completed across Panama in 1855, but no canal was constructed
until years after the great transcontinental railroads had bound
California to the East by bonds which required no foreign
sanction. Yet the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty remained an entangling
alliance, destined to give lovers of peace and amity many more
uncomfortable hours.

During the Civil War other causes of irritation arose between the
United States and Great Britain. The proclamation of neutrality,
by which the British Government recognized the Confederacy as a
belligerent, seemed to the North an unfriendly act. Early in the
war occurred the Trent affair, which added to the growing
resentment.* It was held to be a violation of professed
neutrality that Confederate commerce destroyers were permitted to
be built and fitted out in British yards. The subsequent transfer
of hundreds of thousands of tons of American shipping to British
registry, owing to the depredations of these raiders, still
further incensed the American people. It was in the midst of
these strained relations that the Fenian Brotherhood in the