thern friends were quick to strike at this weakness in Southern
armour; they repeatedly used a phrase, "The Foul Blot," and by mere
iteration gave such currency to it that even in Southern meetings it was
repeated. _The Index_, as early as February, 1864, felt compelled to
meet the phrase and in an editorial, headed "The Foul Blot," argued the
error of Southern friends. As long as they could use the word "blot" in
characterization of Southern slavery, _The Index_ felt that there could
be no effective British push for Southern independence and it asserted
that slavery, in the sense in which England understood it, did not exist
in the Confederacy.

"... It is truly horrible to reduce human beings to the
condition of cattle, to breed them, to sell them, and
otherwise dispose of them, as cattle. But is it defending
such practices to say that the South does none of these
things, but that on the contrary, both in theory and in
practice, she treats the negro as a fellow-creature, with a
soul to be saved, with feelings to be respected, though in
the social order in a subordinate place, and of an
intellectual organization which requires guardianship with
mutual duties and obligations? This system is called slavery,
because it developed itself out of an older and very
different one of that name, but for this the South is not
to blame.

* * * * *

"But of this the friends of the South may be assured, that so
long as they make no determined effort to relieve the
Southern character from this false drapery, they will never
gain for it that respect, that confidence in the rectitude of
Southern motives, that active sympathy, which can alone evoke
effective assistance.... The best assurance you can give that
the destinies of the negro race are safe in Southern hands
is, not that the South will repent and reform, but that she
has consistently and conscientiously been the friend and
benefactor of that race.

* * * * *

"It is, therefore, always with pain that we hear such
expressions as 'the foul blot,' and similar ones, fall from
the lips of earnest promoters of Confederate Independence. As
a concession they are useless; as a confession they are
untrue.... Thus the Southerner may retort as we have seen
that an Englishman would