ave failed to justify to the full, had a cessation
of the war allowed the Confederacy to develop internally, according to
its own bias. Rumors were even rife of a possible monarchy; and leading
Southerners were credited with the statement, that the best upshot of
all, would popular prejudice in the South but allow of it, would be to
import a king from the English royal family. Such rumors may have been
fallacious, but they were not unacceptable to the British Tory. On the
other hand, the disruption of the United States by the secession of the
South was continually spoken of as "the breakdown of Democracy," or "the
bubble of Democracy has burst." The experiment of a great federative
republic--or, one might say, of a great republic, whether federative or
otherwise--was held to have been tried, and to have broken down. The
fact that there would be two republics, jointly coextensive with the
original one, went for little, inasmuch as neither of the two could be
as powerful as that one, and they would be divided by conflicting policy
and interests, even if not engaged in active hostilities. All these
considerations were not only powerful determinants to Southernism, but
in themselves balm to the conservative heart, and hardly less so to that
overwhelming section of educated liberal opinion in this country, which,
genuinely liberal though its politics may be according to the English
standard, abhors all approach towards what is termed "Americanizing our
institutions," and is fully as eager as the strictly conservative class
to lay hold of any facts which may make monarchy appear a stable, and
republicanism an unstable system. It was but a very short time before
the fall of Richmond that I heard an Englishman, so far from
anticipating the catastrophe of the South, repeat the threadbare augury
of the Times and other journals, that the remaining Federal States would
yet split up into a Western and an Eastern aggregation. The Cerberus of
Democracy was to start his three heads off on three different roads, by
that process common in many of the lower animal organisms, known to
zooelogists as "fission"; and monarchists were fain to augur that very
little of either bite or bark would be thereafter native to his jaws.

Such are the grounds on which I think that British conservatism and
soreness produce a widely diffused feeling of national dislike to
Americans, and that this dislike, beyond all other motives, indisposed
multitudes to t