re merely blind to the fact that a very great and plain issue of
right and wrong was really involved in the war. Gladstone, to take
another instance, was not blind to that, but with irritating
misapprehension he protested against the madness of plunging into war
to propagate the cause of emancipation. Then came in his love of small
states, and from his mouth, while he was a Cabinet Minister, came the
impulsive pronouncement, bitterly regretted by him and bitterly
resented in the North: "Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South
have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have
made--what is more than either--they have made a nation." Many other
Englishmen simply sympathised with the weaker side; many too, it should
be confessed, with the apparently weaker side which they were really
persuaded would win. ("Win the battles," said Lord Robert Cecil to a
Northern lady, "and we Tories shall come round at once.") These things
are recalled because their natural effect in America has to be
understood. What is really lamentable is not that in this distant and
debatable affair the sympathy of so many inclined to the South, but
that, when at least there was a Northern side, there seemed at first to
be hardly any capable of understanding or being stirred by it. Apart
from politicians there were only two Englishmen of the first rank,
Tennyson and Darwin, who, whether or not they understood the matter in
detail, are known to have cared from their hearts for the Northern
cause. It is pleasant to associate with these greater names that of
the author of "Tom Brown." The names of those hostile to the North or
apparently quite uninterested are numerous and surprising. Even
Dickens, who had hated slavery, and who in "Martin Chuzzlewit" had
appealed however bitterly to the higher national spirit which he
thought latent in America, now, when that spirit had at last and in
deed asserted itself, gave way in his letters to nothing but hatred of
the whole country. And a disposition like this--explicable but
odious--did no doubt exist in the England of those days.

There is, however, quite another aspect of this question besides that
which has so painfully impressed many American memories. When the
largest manufacturing industry of England was brought near to famine by
the blockade, the voice of the stricken working population was loudly
and persistently uttered on the side of the North. There has been no
oth