esborough. 11.--Off at 8
A.M. to take the rail at Guisbro. At Middlesborough many friends
had gathered at the station to give us a parting cheer. We came on
to York, went at once to the mansion-house, and then visited the
minister. At two came the "luncheon," and I had to address another
kind of audience.

Unhappily, the slave must still go in the triumphal car to remind us of
the fallibilities of men, and here the conqueror made a grave mistake. At
the banquet in the town hall of Newcastle (Oct. 7), with which all these
joyous proceedings had begun, Mr. Gladstone let fall a sentence about the
American war of which he was destined never to hear the last: "We know
quite well that the people of the Northern states have not yet drunk of
the cup--they are still trying to hold it far from their lips--which all the
rest of the world see they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own
opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is
no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an
army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more
than either, they have made a nation."

Here the speaker was forgetful of a wholesome saying of his own, that "a
man who speaks in public ought to know, besides his own meaning, the
meaning which others will attach to his words." The sensation was
immediate and profound. All the world took so pointed an utterance to mean
that the government were about to recognise the independence of the South.
The cotton men were thrown into a position of doubt and uncertainty that
still further disturbed their trade. Orders for cotton were countermanded,
and the supply of the precious material for a moment threatened to become
worse than ever. Cobden and Bright were twitted with the lapse of their
favourite from a central article of their own creed and commandments.
Louis Blanc, then in exile here, describing the feeling of the country,
compares the sympathy for the North to a dam and the sympathy for the
South to a torrent, and says he fears that Gladstone at Newcastle had
yielded to the temptation of courting popularity.(57) The American
minister dropped a hint about passports.(58)

To the numerous correspondents who complained of his language Mr.
Gladstone framed a form of reply, disclaiming responsibility for all the
various inferences that people chose to draw from his language. "And
generally," his secretary