men readily accepted the plea of the South that it was
threatened with intolerable interference; indeed to this day it is
hardly credible to Englishmen that the grievance against which the
South arose in such passionate revolt was so unsubstantial as it really
was. On the other hand, the case of the North was not apprehended.
How it came to pass, in the intricate and usually uninteresting play of
American politics, that a business community, which had seemed pretty
tolerant of slavery, was now at war on some point which was said to be
and said not to be slavery, was a little hard to understand. Those of
us who remember our parents' talk of the American Civil War did not
hear from them the true and fairly simple explanation of the war, that
the North fought because it refused to connive further in the extension
of slavery, and would not--could not decently--accept the disruption of
a great country as the alternative. It is strictly true that the
chivalrous South rose in blind passion for a cause at the bottom of
which lay the narrowest of pecuniary interests, while the over-sharp
Yankees, guided by a sort of comic backwoodsman, fought, whether wisely
or not, for a cause as untainted as ever animated a nation in arms.
But it seems a paradox even now, and there is no reproach in the fact,
that our fathers, who had not followed the vacillating course of
Northern politics hitherto, did not generally take it in. We shall see
in a later chapter how Northern statesmanship added to their
perplexity. But it is impossible not to be ashamed of some of the
forms in which English feeling showed itself and was well known in the
North to show itself. Not only the articles of some English
newspapers, but the private letters of Americans who then found
themselves in the politest circles in London, are unpleasant to read
now. It is painful, too, that a leader of political thought like
Cobden should even for a little while--and it was only a little
while--have been swayed in such a matter by a sympathy relatively so
petty as agreement with the Southern doctrine of Free Trade. We might
now call it worthier of Prussia than of England that a great Englishman
like Lord Salisbury (then Lord Robert Cecil) should have expressed
friendship for the South as a good customer of ours, and antagonism for
the North as a rival in our business. When such men as these said such
things they were, of course, not brutally indifferent to right, they
we