n in Lancashire, Cheshire, and elsewhere, who are
bearing with heroic fortitude the privation which your war has entailed
upon them!... Their sublime resignation, their self-forgetfulness,
their observance of law, their whole-souled love of the cause of human
freedom, their quick and clear perception of the merits of the question
between the North and the South... are extorting the admiration of all
classes of the community ..."

How much of all this do you ever hear from the people who remember the
Alabama?

Strictly in accord with Beecher's vivid summary of the true England in
our Civil War, are some passages of a letter from Mr. John Bigelow, who
was at that time our Consul-General at Paris, and whose impressions,
written to our Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, on February 6, 1863, are
interesting to compare with what Beecher says in that letter, from which
I have already given extracts.

"The anti-slavery meetings in England are having their effect upon the
Government already... The Paris correspondent of the London Post also
came to my house on Wednesday evening... He says... that there are about
a dozen persons who by their position and influence over the organs
of public opinion have produced all the bad feeling and treacherous
con-duct of England towards America. They are people who, as members of
the Government in times past, have been bullied by the U. S.... They are
not entirely ignorant that the class who are now trying to overthrow the
Government were mainly responsible for the brutality, but they think we
as a nation are disposed to bully, and they are disposed to assist in
any policy that may dismember and weaken us. These scars of wounded
pride, however, have been carefully concealed from the public, who
therefore cannot be readily made to see why, when the President has
distinctly made the issue between slave labor and free labor, that
England should not go with the North. He says these dozen people who
rule England hate us cordially... "

There were more than a dozen, a good many more, as we know from Charles
and Henry Adams. But read once again the last paragraph of Beecher's
letter, and note how it corresponds with what Mr. Bigelow says about the
feeling which our Government (for thirty years "in the hands or under
the influence of Southern statesmen") had raised against us by its bad
manners to European governments. This was the harvest sown by shirt
sleeves diplomacy and reaped by Mr. Adams in 1