ctical danger,--by
the hatred of war,--and by the sympathy for the gallant weaker
combatant. I am compelled reluctantly to add, that the particular
operation of these various influences reflects no credit upon British
consistency of farsightedness. The conservative temper which stiffens
Englishmen towards America was the very same which, in the interests of
the moment, led them to justify violent revolutionary measures, and
armed resistance to the constitutional and national majority. The
greater the conservative, the greater the advocate of insurrection. In
like manner, the English detestation of slavery was overwhelmed by
sympathy for an "oppressed" community, whose oppression (apart from the
much-paraded tariff and other such questions) consisted in a definite
intimation that they would not henceforward be allowed to enlarge the
area of slavery, and in a suspicion present to their own minds that even
the existing area of that cherished institution would be narrowed, and
finally reduced to nought,--expunged "as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it
and turning it upside down." The friends among us of constitutional
liberty and of legality, the enemies of anarchy, the unseduced
execrators of slavery, the upholders of the tie of brotherhood across
the Atlantic, may well look back with shame to the time--and it was no
matter of days or weeks, but a period of about four years together--when
the loudest and most accepted voices in England exulted over the now
ludicrously delusive proposition that the United States were a burst
bubble, and slavery the irremovable corner-stone of an empire. It may be
a lesson to nations against the indulgence in rancor, the abnegation of
the national conscience, and the dear delight of prophesying one's own
likings. "Now, therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in
the mouth of these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil against
thee."

The collapse of the South came at last; and nearly at the same moment
came the murder of a man whose modesty, integrity, firmness,
single-minded persistency, unresentfulness, and substantial truth of
judgment have been invested by his fate with an almost sacred depth of
interest and significance,--President Lincoln. Amid the many momentous
bearings of these events, it is for me to note only one of comparative
unimportance,--the effect which they produced upon English public
opinion. There was, I think, a certain good-fortune for Southern
sympathize