al, by
English writers. Each renewal of the conflict in America, even though
local, not national in character, drew out a flood of comment. In the
public press this blot upon American civilization was a steady subject
for attack, and that attack was naturally directed against the South.
The London _Times_, in particular, lost no opportunity of presenting the
matter to its readers. In 1856, a Mr. Thomas Gladstone visited Kansas
during the height of the border struggles there, and reported his
observations in letters to the _Times_. The writer was wholly on the
side of the Northern settlers in Kansas, though not hopeful that the
Kansas struggle would expand to a national conflict. He constantly
depicted the superior civilization, industry, and social excellence of
the North as compared with the South[26].

Mrs. Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ excited greater interest in England
than in America itself. The first London edition appeared in May, 1852,
and by the end of the year over one million copies had been sold, as
opposed to one hundred and fifty thousand in the United States. But if
one distinguished writer is to be believed, this great British interest
in the book was due more to English antipathy to America than to
antipathy to slavery[27]. This writer was Nassau W. Senior, who, in
1857, published a reprint of his article on "American Slavery" in the
206th number of the _Edinburgh Review_, reintroducing in his book
extreme language denunciatory of slavery that had been cut out by the
editor of the _Review_[28]. Senior had been stirred to write by the
brutal attack upon Charles Sumner in the United States Senate after his
speech of May 19-20, 1856, evidence, again, that each incident of the
slavery quarrel in America excited British attention.

Senior, like Thomas Gladstone, painted the North as all anti-slavery,
the South as all pro-slavery. Similar impressions of British
understanding (or misunderstanding) are received from the citations of
the British provincial press, so favoured by Garrison in his
_Liberator_[29]. Yet for intellectual Britain, at least--that Britain
which was vocal and whose opinion can be ascertained in spite of this
constant interest in American slavery, there was generally a fixed
belief that slavery in the United States was so firmly established that
it could not be overthrown. Of what use, then, the further expenditure
of British sympathy or effort in a lost cause? Senior himself, at the
concl