In November 1861, when the U. S. Civil War was just getting going. Captain Charles Wilkes of the Union Navy, commanding the screw sloop San Jacinto, fired a shot across the bows of the British Royal Mail packet Trent as she steamed along the Bahama Channel. The Trent hove to and, under the San Jacinto's guns, surrendered to a U. S. boarding party the persons of James Murray Mason and John Slidell, commissioners on their way to represent the Confederacy in Great Britain and France, respectively.
Queen Victoria's Government (Prime Minister: Lord Palmerston) was so incensed that, besides a hot note to President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, it sent 8,000 picked troops to Canada, got its Navy ready. England raged and ranted about dismembering the upstart Republic. New York City feted Captain Wilkes and Northern hotheads boasted that the Union would give Britain some of the medicine it was about to give the South. Abraham Lincoln kept mum, for weeks. Eventually he had Secretary of State Seward discover that, while Captain Wilkes was within international law in arresting the Trent, he went beyond it in removing its passengers without taking the ship and them before a prize court. Messrs. Mason & Slidell were released from jail in Boston, placed on a British man-o'-war which carried them triumphantly abroad. Abuse was heaped high on Lincoln's head by many of his countrymen, but he patiently stuck to his private explanation of the affair: "One war at a time."
Last month an anonymous British cruiser fired across the bows of the Japanese liner Asama Maru, only 35 miles off Japan's naval base of Yokosuka. From the Asama Maru a British boarding party took 21 Germans, judged to be of military age and ability, returning from U. S. employment via Japan and Siberia to Germany (TIME, Jan. 29). These the British interned at Hong Kong. Japan fumed. Great Britain cited her rights under a convention of 1909 (never ratified) which says that persons liable to military service for an enemy may be removed by a belligerent from neutral ships. But last week Britain backed down to the extent of offering to hand back to Japan nine of the 21 Nazis. Her basic reasons for this were: 1) to save Japanese "face"; 2) "One war at a time." This gesture was met by Japan (which also has one war already on her hands) with an order forbidding Japanese ships to carry military-age citizens of belligerent countries.