his day to our own can be understood without some study of the attitude of the two countries to each other during the war. If we could put aside any previous judgment on the cause as between North and South, there are still some marked features in the attitude of England during the war which every Englishman must now regret. It should emphatically be added that there were some upon which every Englishman should look back with satisfaction. Many of the expressions of English opinion at that time betray a powerlessness to comprehend another country and a self-sufficiency in judging it, which, it may humbly be claimed, were not always and are not now so characteristic of Englishmen as they were in that period of our history, in many ways so noble, which we associate with the rival influences of Palmerston and of Cobden. It is not at all surprising that ordinary English gentlemen started with a leaning towards the South; they liked Southerners and there was much in the manners of the North, and in the experiences of Englishmen trading with or investing in the North, which did not impress them favourably. Many Northerners discovered something snobbish and unsound in this preference, but they were not quite right. With this leaning, Englishmen readily accepted the plea of the South that it was threatened with intolerable interference; indeed to this day it is hardly credible to Englishmen that the grievance against which the South arose in such passionate revolt was so unsubstantial as it really was. On the other hand, the case of the North was not apprehended. How it came to pass, in the intricate and usually uninteresting play of American politics, that a business community, which had seemed pretty tolerant of slavery, was now at war on some point which was said to be and said not to be slavery, was a little hard to understand. Those of us who remember our parents' talk of the American Civil War did not hear from them the true and fairly simple explanation of the war, that the North fought because it refused to connive further in the extension of slavery, and would not-could not decently-accept the dis

ruption of a great country as the alternative. It is strictly true that the chivalrous South rose in blind passion for a cause at the bottom of which lay the narrowest of pecuniary interests, while the over-sharp Yankees, guided by a sort of comic backwoodsman, fought, whether wisely or not, for a cause as untainted as ever animated a nation in arms. But it seems a paradox even now, and there is no reproach in the fact, that our fathers, who had not followed the vacillating course of Northern politics hitherto, did not generally take it in. We shall see in a later chapter how Northern statesmanship added to their perplexity. But it is impossible not to be ashamed of some of the forms in which English feeling showed itself and was well known in the North to show itself. Not only the articles of some English newspapers, but the private letters of Americans who then found themselves in the politest circles in London, are unpleasant to read now. It is painful, too, that a leader of political thought like Cobden should even for a little while-and it was only a little while-have been swayed in such a matter by a sympathy relatively so petty as agreement with the Southern doctrine of Free Trade. We might now call it worthier of Prussia than of England that a great Englishman like Lord Salisbury (then Lord Robert Cecil) should have expressed friendship for the South as a good customer of ours, and antagonism for the North as a rival in our business. When such men as these said such things they were, of course, not brutally indifferent to right, they were 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;

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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 other 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 without 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