and judicial examination of the claimed Southern right of secession, and his legal argument could be met, and was met, with equally logical, apparently, pro-Southern argument as to the nature of the American constitution.  Thus early did the necessity of Lincoln’s “border state policy”—­a policy which extended even to warnings from Seward to American diplomats abroad not to bring into consideration the future of slavery—­give ground for foreign denial that there were any great moral principles at stake in the American conflict.

In the meantime the two sections in America were busily preparing for a test of strength, and for that test the British press, reporting preparations, waited with interest.  It came on July 21 in the first battle of Bull Run, when approximately equal forces of raw levies, 30,000 each, met in the first pitched battle of the war, and where the Northern army, after an initial success, ultimately fled in disgraceful rout.  Before Bull Run the few British papers early taking strong ground for the North had pictured Lincoln’s preparations as so tremendous as inevitably destined to crush, quickly, all Southern resistance.  The Daily News lauded Lincoln’s message to Congress as the speech of a great leader, and asserted that the issue in America was for all free people a question of upholding the eternal principles of liberty, morality and justice.  “War for such a cause, though it be civil war, may perhaps without impiety be called ’God’s most perfect instrument in working out a pure intent[322].’” The disaster to the Northern army, its apparent testimony that the North lacked real fighting men, bolstered that British opinion which regarded military measures against the South as folly—­an impression reinforced in the next few months by the long pause by the North before undertaking any further great effort in the field.  The North was not really ready for determined war, indeed, until later in the year.  Meanwhile many were the moralizations in the British press upon Bull Run’s revelation of Northern military weakness.

Probably the most influential newspaper utterances of the moment were the letters of W.H.  Russell to the Times.  This famous war-correspondent had been sent to America in the spring of 1861 by Delane, editor of the Times, his first letter, written on March 29, appearing in the issue of April 16.  He travelled through the South, was met everywhere with eager courtesy as became a man of his reputation and one representing the most important organ of British public opinion, returned to the North in late June, and at Washington was given intimate interviews by Seward and other leaders.  For a time his utterances were watched for, in both England and America, with the greatest interest and expectancy, as the opinions of an unusually able and thoroughly honest, dispassionate observer.  He never concealed his abhorrence of slavery, terming apologists of that institution “the