llows that all or most of these are not Tories in
grain, in some part of their mental or personal anatomy. A total
revulsion in public and popular feeling would have to take place,
before, for instance, such an institution as our House of Lords could be
in any practical danger: no such revulsion appears to be within the
purview of any one now living, even as a matter of opinion, much less of
practical performance. I believe, that, if universal suffrage were to
become the law of the land to-morrow, not much difference would ensue in
the _personnel_ or the tone of the House of Commons. It could hardly
help ensuing, in the long run, by the inevitable reaction Of
institutions upon the people who exercise or undergo them, and, with a
changed House of Commons, much else would, no doubt, be changed; but
there seems strong reason to doubt whether a democratic constituency
would, in the earlier stages, produce a decisively democratic body of
representatives. As regards English opinion upon the American dispute,
nothing was commoner than the remark, that the Southerners were "the
better gentlemen," or "represented the aristocratic element," and
therefore commanded the speaker's good wishes in their struggle; and
this not necessarily from members of the landed gentry, or from
political anti-liberals, but equally from Liverpool merchants, or others
of the middle class. The remark may have been true or incorrect,--with
that I have nothing to do; but it was very generally accepted in England
as accurate, and represented a large body of consequent sympathy. In
like manner, people were slow to believe in the possibility of Lincoln's
competence for his post; because he rose from the populace to his great
elevation, they inferred that he was a boor and a bungler, not (as might
have seemed equally fair and rather more logical) that he was a capable
man; and, with a foregone conclusion, they were quite ready to construe
as blundering and grotesque that line of policy and conduct on his part,
which, after a war of no immoderate length, resulted in the surmounting
of obstacles which they had dubbed insurmountable.

This innate British temper--aristocratic, conservative, or Tory,
whichever one may term it--is the first of the two foundations whereon
English dislike of Americans appears to me to rest. The second is a
natural, though assuredly not a laudable feeling,--the residual soreness
left by our defeat in the old American War of Independen