ing at that time, nor any
ordinary English reader of tolerating, the theory that slavery is right.
(It is no part of my plan or business to discuss this question of
slavery: I will simply say, to avoid misapprehension, that, while
recognizing the profound good sense of much that Carlyle has said on
this and cognate matters, my own instinct of right and habits of opinion
rebel against the pro-slavery theory, and never allowed me to doubt
which side I was on, when the question came to its supreme practical
issue in the civil war.) Such, then, appears to me to have been the
state of English opinion on this subject when the secession occurred. On
one ground or another, a large proportion of our population and our
writers sided with the South. At first I fancy that no journal and no
average Englishman affirmed that slavery is justifiable; but, as events
progressed, it became more and more difficult to say that the South was
right, and yet that slavery was wrong. "No man can serve two masters,"
not even such a couple as Jefferson Davis and Wilberforce. The British
sympathizers, who had determined to "hold to the one," were reduced to
the logical necessity of "despising the other." It was a surprising
spectacle. The dogmas and traditions of half a century snapped like
threads, when it became their office to constrain a _penchant_.
Ethnologists and politicians were equally ready to find out that the
negro was fit for nothing but enforced servitude. Parsons,
marchionesses, and maiden aunts received simultaneous enlightenment as
to Christian truth, and discovered that slavery was not prohibited, but
was even countenanced, in the Bible. The inference was inevitable: what
Moses did not condemn in Jews thirty-three centuries ago must be the
correct thing for Anglo-Americans to uphold at the present day. Did not
St. Paul tell Onesimus to return to his master? etc., etc. Many
Secessionist organs of public opinion, no doubt, declined to commit
themselves to pro-slavery views: they started with the assumption that
slavery is an evil and a crime, and they continued protesting the same
creed. How far this creed was compatible with so rabid an advocacy of
the Southern cause,--how far it was possible for genuine abominators of
slavery to continue unfaltering their Southern palinodes and Northern
anathemas, after such acts on the part of the South as the refusal to
include colored troops among exchangeable prisoners of war, and the
massacre a