t Fort Pillow, and such acts on the part of the North as the
Emancipation Proclamation, and the introduction of the Constitutional
Amendment for abolition,--these are questions which appear deserving of
an answer; yet one may be quite prepared to find that the spirit of
party, which made such an anomaly possible, is blind to the fact of its
being anomalous, and has an answer pat. My own belief about the matter
is this. When the Secession began, there were two sects among the
English partisans of the South: the Carlylese apologists of slavery,--a
very small sect; and the political advocates of Secession, who, partly
with full conviction, partly as a mere matter of unchallenged use and
wont, repudiated slavery,--a very large sect. The Southern partisanship
of the former sect was perfectly logical; that of the latter unable to
stand the wear and tear of discussion, as the progress of events made it
more and more manifest that slavery or abolition was the real issue.
With this latter sect the political or other liking for the South was a
much stronger and more active feeling than the humanitarian or other
dislike of slavery; the first feeling, indeed, soon developed into a
passion, the second into a self-reproachful obstruction. Thus the
logical view, that slavery as well as the slaveholding interest was
right, exercised a powerful centripetal attraction; and many minds were
betrayed into adopting it as a truth, or using it for a purpose, without
probing the depth of apostasy to their own more solid convictions, or of
moral disingenuousness, which the practice involved. The South had to be
justified, and here were at hand the means of justification. Now that
the contest is over, I have no doubt that a large residuum of tolerance
for slavery, much larger than seemed possible for Englishmen before the
Secession, is left behind; but also that this tolerance was in most
instances factitious and occasional, and is cleared or clearing away,
and will leave the British reprobation of slavery, in a little while,
pretty nearly where it used to be of old. The orange has been squeezed:
what use can the rind be of? It rests with the re-United States, by a
just and successful treatment of the still formidable negro question,[B]
to persuade unreluctant minds in the Old Country that slavery is, in
very deed, the unmitigated wrong and nuisance which they used to reckon
it; and those who have sympathized with the North look confidently for
thi