to be learned, thereby bringing
out the fighting qualities of British democracy. Throughout 1861, the
comment was relatively mild. In July, _Blackwood's_ declared:

"It is precisely because we do not share the admiration of
America for her own institutions and political tendencies
that we do not now see in the impending change an event
altogether to be deplored. In those institutions and
tendencies we saw what our own might be if the most dangerous
elements of our Constitution should become dominant. We saw
democracy rampant, with no restriction upon its caprices. We
saw a policy which received its impulses always from below
... nor need we affect particularly to lament the exhibition
of the weak point of a Constitution ... the disruption of
which leaves entirely untouched the laws and usages which
America owes to England, and which have contributed so
powerfully to her prosperity...."

"With a rival Government on the frontier ... with great
principles to be not vapoured about but put to the proof we
should probably see the natural aristocracy rise from the
dead level of the Republic, raising the national character
with its own elevation[1336]."

In the same month the _Quarterly_, always more calm, logical and
convincing than _Blackwood's_, published "Democracy on its Trial[1337]."
"The example of America kept alive, as it had created, the party of
progress"; now "it has sunk from the decrepitude of premature old age."
If England, after such an example, permits herself to be led into
democracy she "will have perished by that wilful infatuation which no
warning can dispel."

Adams had complained that few British friends of progress identified the
cause of the North with their own, but this was true of Americans also.
The _Atlantic Monthly_ for July 1861, discussed British attitude wholly
in terms of cotton supply. But soon there appeared in the British press
so many preachments on the "lesson" of America that the aristocratic
effort to gain an advantage at home became apparent to all[1338]. The
_Economist_ moralized on the "untried" character of American
institutions and statesmen, the latter usually as ignorant as the
"masses" whom they represented and if more intellectual still more
worthy of contempt because of their "voluntary moral degradation" to the
level of their constituents[1339]. "The upper and ruling class" wrote