the world we wish to see the faults, so specious and so
fatal, of their political system exposed, in the most
effective way.... And the venerable Lincoln, the respectable
Seward, the raving editors, the gibbering mob, and the
swift-footed warriors of Bull's Run, are no malicious tricks
of fortune played off on an unwary nation, but are all of
them the legitimate offspring of the great Republic ...
dandled and nursed--one might say coddled--by Fortune, the
spoiled child Democracy, after playing strange pranks before
high heaven, and figuring in odd and unexpected disguises,
dies as sheerly from lack of vitality as the oldest of
worn-out despotisms.... In the hope that this contest may end
in the extinction of mob rule, we become reconciled to the
much slighter amount of suffering that war inflicts on
America[1346]."

Equally outspoken were a few public men who early espoused the cause of
the South. Beresford Hope, before a "distinguished audience" used
language insulting to the North, fawning upon the South and picturing
the latter as wholly admirable for its aristocratic tendencies. For this
he was sharply taken to task by the _Spectator_[1347]. More sedately the
Earl of Shrewsbury proclaimed, "I see in America the trial of Democracy
and its failure. I believe that the dissolution of the Union is
inevitable, and that men now before me will live to see an aristocracy
established in America[1348]." In all countries and at all times there
are men over-eager in early prophecy on current events, but in such
utterances as these there is manifest not merely the customary desire to
stand in the limelight of assured knowledge and wisdom, but also the
happy conviction that events in America were working to the undoing of
the Radicals of Great Britain. If they would not be supine the Radicals
must strike back. On December 4, at Rochdale where, as the _Times_
asserted, he was sure of an audience sympathetic on purely personal
grounds, Bright renewed his profession of faith in the American Republic
and sang his accustomed praises of its great accomplishments[1349]. The
battle, for England, on American democracy, was joined; the challenge
issued by aristocratic England, accepted.

But apart from extreme factions at either end of the scale there stood a
group holding a middle ground opinion, not yet sure of the historical
significance of the American collapse