secutive series. He had endeavored, he told them, to
enlist the judgment, the conscience, the interests of the British people
against the attempt to spread Slavery over the continent, and the
rebellion it has kindled. He had shown that Slavery was the only cause
of the war, that sympathy with the South was only aiding the building up
of a slave-empire, that the North was contending for its own existence
and that of popular institutions.

Mr. Beecher then asked his audience to look at the question with him
from the American point of view. He showed how the conflict began as a
moral question; the sensitiveness of the South; the tenderness for them
on the part of many Northern apologizers, with whom he himself had never
stood. He pointed out how the question gradually emerged in politics;
the encroachments of the South, until they reached the Judiciary itself;
he repeated to them the admissions of Mr. Stephens as to the
preponderating influence the South had all along held in the Government.
An interruption obliged him to explain that adjustment of our State and
National governments which Englishmen seem to find so hard to
understand. Nothing shows his peculiar powers to more advantage than
just such interruptions. Then he displays his felicitous facility of
illustration, his familiar way of bringing a great question to the test
of some parallel fact that everybody before him knows. An American
state-question looks as mysterious to an English audience as an ear of
Indian corn wrapt in its sheath to an English wheat-grower. Mr. Beecher
husks it for them as only an American born and bred can do. He wants a
few sharp questions to rouse his quick spirit. He could almost afford to
carry with him his _picadores_ to sting him with sarcasms, his _chulos_
to flap their inflammatory epithets in his face, and his _banderilleros_
to stab him with their fiery insults into a _plaza de toros_,--an
audience of John Bulls.

Having cleared up this matter so that our comatose cousins understood
the relations of the dough and the apple in our national dumpling,--to
borrow one of their royal reminiscences,--having eulogized the fidelity
of the North to the national compact, he referred to the action of "that
most true, honest, just, and conscientious magistrate, Mr. Lincoln,"--at
the mention of whose name the audience cheered as long and loud as if
they had descended from the ancient Ephesians.

Mr. Beecher went on to show how the North coul