Bright have not left you in doubt of
the fact that they and all they represent are on your side.

I need not say,--for you have shown that you know it well,--that, as
regards the working-men of our cotton-factories, this sympathy was an
offering to your cause as costly as it was sincere. Your civil war
paralyzed their industry, brought ruin into their houses, deprived them
and their families not only of bread, but, so far as their vision
extended, of the hope of bread. Yet they have not wavered in their
allegiance to the Right. Your slave-owning aristocracy had made up their
minds that chivalry was confined to aristocracies, and that over the
vulgar souls of the common people Cotton must be King. The working-man
of Manchester, though he lives not like a Southern gentleman by the
sweat of another's brow, but like a plebeian by the sweat of his own,
has shown that chivalry is not confined to aristocracies, and that even
over vulgar souls Cotton is not always King. I heard one of your
statesmen the other day, after speaking indignantly of those who had
fitted out the Alabama, pray God to bless the working-men of England.
Our nation, like yours, is not a single body animated by the same
political sentiments, but a mixed mass of contending interests and
parties. Beware how you fire into that mass, or your shot may strike a
friend.

When England in the mass is spoken of as your enemy on this occasion,
the London "Times" is taken for the voice of the country. The "Times"
was in former days a great popular organ. It led vehemently and even
violently the struggle for Parliamentary Reform. In that way it made its
fortune; and having made its fortune, it takes part with the rich. Its
proprietor in those days was a man with many faults, but he was a man of
the people. Aristocratic society disliked and excluded him; he lived at
war with it to the end. Affronted by the Whigs, he became in a certain
sense a Tory; but he united his Toryism with Chartism, and was sent to
Parliament for Nottingham by Tories and Chartists combined. The
opposition of his journal to our New Poor-Law evinced, though in a
perverse way, his feeling for the people. But his heir, the present
proprietor, was born in the purple. He is a wealthy landed gentleman. He
sits in Parliament for a constituency of landlords. He is thought to
have been marked out for a peerage. It is accusing him of no crime to
suppose, that, so far as he controls the "Times," it takes the