er demonstration so splendid of the spirit which remains widely
diffused among individual English working men and which at one time
animated labour as a concentrated political force. John Bright, who
completely grasped the situation in America, took a stand, in which J.
S. Mill, W. E. Forster, and the Duke of Argyll share his credit, but
which did peculiar and great honour to him as a Quaker who hated war.
But there is something more that must be said. The conduct of the
English Government, supported by the responsible leaders of the
Opposition, was at that time, no less than now, the surest indication
of the more deep-seated feelings of the real bulk of Englishmen on any
great question affecting our international relations; and the attitude
of the Government, in which Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister and Lord
John Russell Foreign Secretary, and with which in this matter
Conservative leaders like Disraeli and Sir Stafford Northcote entirely
concurred, was at the very least free from grave reproach. Lord John
Russell, and, there can be little doubt, his colleagues generally,
regarded slavery as an "accursed institution," but they felt no anger
with the people of the South for it, because, as he said, "we gave them
that curse and ours were the hands from which they received that fatal
gift"; in Lord John at least the one overmastering sentiment upon the
outbreak of the war was that of sheer pain that "a great Republic,
which has enjoyed institutions under which the people have been free
and happy, is placed in jeopardy." Their insight into American affairs
did not go deep; but the more seriously we rate "the strong antipathy
to the North, the strong sympathy with the South, and the passionate
wish to have cotton," of which a Minister, Lord Granville, wrote at the
time, the greater is the credit due both to the Government as a whole
and to Disraeli for having been conspicuously unmoved by these
considerations; and "the general approval from Parliament, the press,
and the public," which, as Lord Granville added, their policy received,
is creditable too. It is perfectly true, as will be seen later, that
at one dark moment in the fortunes of the North, the Government very
cautiously considered the possibility of intervention, but Disraeli, to
whom a less patriotic course would have offered a party advantage,
recalled to them their own better judgment; and it is impossible to
read their correspondence on this question wit