h the hostile populations. The Southerners,
on the contrary, figured as a chivalrous territorial body driven to
fight "for their hearths and homes," (I have even seen "their altars" in
print,) waging a noble defensive war against preconcerted spoliation and
despotism. To this moment, many people have phrases of the above sort
upon their lips.

Then there were certain personal feelings which told powerfully in the
same direction,--personal partly to the English as a nation, and partly
to the more prominent actors in the war. The contrast between the
American colonies of Great Britain throwing off their allegiance to the
Old Country because they saw fit to do so for their own interests, and
the government of the Federation of these same ex-colonies insisting
that some of them, which in their turn see fit to break loose from the
Federal pact, shall not do so, under the alternative of war and the
pains of treason,--this contrast is assuredly a glaring one; many people
considered that it amounted to a positive anomaly,--not a few to a
barefaced act of tyrannic apostasy. The personal feeling of the English
people, their national _amour propre_, conspired to lead towards this
harshest construction of the facts: it was so tempting to convict our
old adversaries out of their own mouths, and make them, by the logic of
events, read out either their recantation of the Colonial Revolution, or
their self-condemnation for the Anti-Secession War. I have already
explained to what extent these views appear to me to be tenable, and
where their weak point lies: that both the insurrection of the colonies
against England, and that of the South against the Federation,--both the
repressive measures of England against the colonies, and of the
Federation against the South,--were in themselves founded on an
indefeasible right, and abstractly defensible; and that the "casting
vote," (so to speak,) in both cases, depends, not upon any wordy denial
of the right, but upon a thorough estimate of all the attendant
conditions, and prominently of the "mights of man."

So far for one phase of the personal question. The other phase pertained
to the character and the deeds of some leading actors in the war-drama.
To most English apprehensions, _the_ hero of the war, from an early
stage of it up to his tragic death, was Stonewall Jackson, whose place
was afterwards taken, in popular esteem, though not in coequal
enthusiasm, by General Lee, both of them Sout