e it."

No one knew better than Carlyle that there is a world diameter between
the South hiring a man for life, and by force holding him in slavery.
But Carlyle for three years poured out such vapid humbug, cant and
hypocrisy as this, and never once was sound in his thinking or fair in
his view-point during the entire war.

Even Charles Dickens, who had written denouncing slavery in his
"American Notes," returned to England in the spring of 1863 to predict
the overwhelming victory of the South, and to characterize the hopes of
Lincoln as "a harmless hallucination." But little by little, English
sentiment began to change. Goldwin Smith, of Oxford University,
consented to speak at a meeting in Manchester to protest against the
building and sending out of piratical ships in support of the Southern
Confederacy. He affirmed boldly that "no nation ever inflicted upon
another more flagrant or more maddening wrong" [in permitting the
_Alabama_ to escape]. No nation with English blood in its veins had ever
borne such a wrong without resentment.

Richard Cobden wrote to Mr. Beecher as to the feeling in England: "In
every other instance ... the popular sympathy of this country has always
leaped to the side of the insurgents the moment a rebellion has broken
out. In the present case, our masses have an instinctive feeling that
their cause is bound up in the prosperity of the United States. It is
true that they have not much power in the direct form of a vote; but
when the millions of this country are led by the religious middle class
they can together prevent the government from pursuing a policy hostile
to their sympathies."

When Beecher appeared and spoke, he aroused, intensified, unified, and
made effective this great underlying force of English popular feeling,
and the unfriendly purposes of the governmental and "upper-class"
element were paralyzed.

Beecher himself was very modest about his achievement. Said he: "When in
October you go to a tree and give it a jar, and the fruit rains down all
about you, it is not you that ripened and sent down the fruit; the whole
summer has been doing that. It was my good fortune to be there when it
was needed that some one should jar the tree; the fruit was not of my
ripening."

Beecher returned home in November of 1863, conscious that he had risked
everything in the service of his imperilled country. He found the entire
North had constituted itself a Committee of Reception to welcom