ively entered into a voluntary bond, and could
voluntarily withdraw from it without gainsaying; and that this ground of
right on the side of the South remained unaffected by any accessory
considerations. This view rapidly gained over the willing convictions of
Southern sympathizers, when the impulse and determination, the courage
and early successes of the South, had once roused strong feelings in its
favor. The earlier argumentative view as to majorities and minorities,
and the fundamental basis of all governments, sank into desuetude, while
the right of a compact community to independent self-government at its
own option occupied the field of vision. Vast numbers of people--I
should think, during the greater part of the war, four fifths of the
whole country--believed in the success of the South; considering it
impossible that so determined a community, with so vast a territory,
should ever be coerced into reunion, and not being prepared for an equal
amount of determination on the part of the Northern Government and
people, or for their capacity, even had the will been admitted, to meet
the required outlay in money and men. Another question, too, was
prominent in men's minds, and indisposed them to contemplating a
subjugated South. They would ask, "What is to be done with the South, on
the unlikely supposition of its being conquered? Is it to become an
American Poland?" All these considerations inclined the great majority
of the nation to believe that the South would succeed; and, of those who
so believed, a large proportion held the Southerners to be in the right,
or sympathized with them to a degree which obscured the strict question
of right in favor of preference.

5th. The party which believed in the right of the South, but which
doubted or disbelieved its eventual success, appears to me to have been
most inconsiderable up to the final stages of the war. I doubt whether I
ever met two men, prior, let me say, to Sherman's march through Georgia,
who would distinctly limit themselves to this: "I wish the South might
succeed, but I don't think it will." When the impending catastrophe of
the South was no longer disputable, the Saturday Review, the idol of our
Club-men and University-men, of those who are at once highly cultivated
and intensely English, and who fancy themselves freer from prejudice and
more large-minded than others in proportion to their incapacity to
perceive that their own prejudices _are_ prejudices,-