hout perceiving that in
this they were actuated by no hostility to the North, but by a sincere
belief that the cause of the North was hopeless and that intervention,
with a view to stopping bloodshed, might prove the course of honest
friendship to all America. Englishmen of a later time have become
deeply interested in America, and may wish that their fathers had
better understood the great issue of the Civil War, but it is matter
for pride, which in honesty should be here asserted, that with many
selfish interests in this contest, of which they were most keenly
aware, Englishmen, in their capacity as a nation, acted with complete
integrity.

But for our immediate purpose the object of thus reviewing a subject on
which American historians have lavished much research is to explain the
effect produced in America by demonstrations of strong antipathy and
sympathy in England. The effect in some ways has been long lasting.
The South caught at every mark of sympathy with avidity, was led by its
politicians to expect help, received none, and became resentful. It is
surprising to be told, but may be true, that the embers of this
resentment became dangerous to England in the autumn of 1914. In the
North the memory of an antipathy which was almost instantly perceived
has burnt deep--as many memoirs, for instance those recently published
by Senator Lodge, show--into the minds of precisely those Americans to
whom Englishmen have ever since been the readiest to accord their
esteem. There were many men in the North with a ready-made dislike of
England, but there were many also whose sensitiveness to English
opinion, if in some ways difficult for us to appreciate, was intense.
Republicans such as James Russell Lowell had writhed under the
reproaches cast by Englishmen upon the acquiescence of all America in
slavery; they felt that the North had suddenly cut off this reproach
and staked everything on the refusal to give way to slavery any
further; they looked now for expressions of sympathy from many quarters
in England; but in the English newspapers which they read and the
reports of Americans in England they found evidence of nothing but
dislike. There soon came evidence, as it seemed to the whole North, of
actually hostile action on the part of the British Government. It
issued a Proclamation enjoining neutrality upon British subjects. This
was a matter of course on the outbreak of what was nothing less than
war; but Northe