s ultimate result.

As a corollary to all that I have been saying in this slight analysis of
English opinion during the war, I should add,--what, indeed, American
writers have abundantly observed,--that the knowledge of American
affairs possessed by the great mass of English partisans was extremely
superficial. I will not now speak of our newspapers and pamphleteers;
but, within my own experience, among ordinary persons, who were quite
ready to take sides, and stand stubbornly to their colors, I have often
found that even such rudimentary points as the distinction between
"States" and "Territories," the Northern resistance to the extension of
slavery into Territories, the issue taken on that immediate question in
the Presidential election of 1860, the relation between the three
Federal Government and the States' governments, and the limits within
which it would be possible for a President and his administration,
however anti-slavery in principle, to interfere with slavery, were
either not understood in theory, or not practically laid to heart.
People would talk as if a Federal President were a Russian autocrat,
who, if sincerely opposed to slavery, would have nothing in the world to
do except to cancel the "peculiar institution" throughout the States,
North and South, by a motion of his will and a stroke of his pen. They
would demonstrate the half-heartedness on this matter of the North, as
represented by its President Lincoln, and the hypocrisy or truckling of
Lincoln himself, by the omission of such a sealing of their professed
faith,--not caring to reflect how utterly subversive these notions must
be of that favorite catchword of Southern partisans; "State rights." It
may be objected, "These people can have been only the extremely
ignorant." That, however, is my own conviction: but such childish
assumptions were not the less prevalent for being preposterous, nor the
less potent in leavening the mass of opinion, when the question was,
which party to adopt.

Something--but necessarily very brief and imperfect--may be added
concerning the particular organs of public opinion which sided with the
North or with the South. I shall confine myself to London publications,
not knowing enough of those in the country to treat that subject even
with fairness, much less with command of the materials. I presume,
however, that the tone of the London press furnishes a tolerable index
to that of the provincial, taking the whole averag