argely with
the South, and partly because a combatant who has no fair chance of
winning ought to give in, and not persist in shedding blood in vain. If
a big man fights a little one, and turns out upon experiment to have
next to no chance of beating him, one soon gets angry with the big one
for "pegging away," even though one may at first have perceived him to
be in the right. Such seemed to many English observers to be the
condition of the case in America. They were mistaken, but excusable; but
for the error in their premise, their deduction would have been correct,
or at least not irrational.

7th. The party which covertly or avowedly, justified slavery was
incomparably larger than any Englishman would have dreamed of a week
before the secession took place. Till then, I doubt whether any writer
of credit, except one, had ventured deliberately to affirm that American
slavery is, under limitations, an allowable and advantageous thing. That
exception is assuredly a most illustrious one, perhaps the strongest
head and stoutest heart in the British dominions, and our living writer
of the most exalted and durable fame,--Thomas Carlyle. His "Occasional
Discourse on the Nigger Question," published some years ago, ruffled and
outraged the anti-slavery mind, which then, and for some while before
and since, might fairly be termed the mind of all England. That
Discourse staggered some readers, and roused others,--roused them to
contemplate the whole question from a more fundamental and actual, a
less traditional and prejudged point of view, than had been in vogue
since our own abolition movement gained the ascendency. It became
apparent to various thinkers that the humanitarian view of the question
was not its be-all and end-all; that some facts and considerations _per
contra_ had to be taken into account; and that what one train of thought
and feeling denounced as a mere self-condemned wrong might, according to
another, be even regarded as a higher right. Still, this "new light"
upon slavery was received more or less fully by only a very few minds,
as compared with the general mass of British conviction,--a few
thorough-going believers in Carlyle, a few hardy and open-minded
speculators; hardly more, perhaps, in all, than those who would join Mr.
John Stuart Mill in saying that the right form of Parliamentary suffrage
is universal suffrage, open to women as well as men. No ordinary English
newspaper would have thought of profess