the caption, “Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s Wounded Feelings,” the Saturday Review avowed disbelief in the existence of a “Holy War” in America.  “The North does not proclaim abolition and never pretended to fight for anti-slavery.  The North has not hoisted for its oriflamme the Sacred Symbol of Justice to the Negro; its cri de guerre is not unconditional emancipation.”  “The Governmental course of the British nation ... is not yet directed by small novelists and their small talk[338].”  Thomas Hughes also came in for sarcastic reference in this article, having promptly taken up the cudgels for Mrs. Stowe.  He returned to the attack through the columns of the Spectator, reasserting slavery as an issue and calling on Englishmen to put themselves in the place of Americans and realize the anger aroused by “deliberate imputations of mean motives,” and by the cruel spirit of the utterances.  A nation engaged in a life and death struggle should not be treated in a tone of flippant and contemptuous serenity.  The British press had chosen “to impute the lowest motives, to cull out and exult over all the meanness, and bragging, and disorder which the contest has brought out, and while we sit on the bank, to make no allowances for those who are struggling in the waves[339].”

Besides the Spectator, on the Northern side, stood the Daily News, declaring that the South could not hold out, and adding, “The Confederate States may be ten millions, but they are wrong—­notoriously, flagrantly wrong[340].”  The Daily News, according to its “Jubilee” historians, stood almost alone in steadfast advocacy of the Northern cause[341].  This claim of unique service to the North is not borne out by an examination of newspaper files, but is true if only metropolitan dailies of large circulation are considered.  The Spectator was a determined and consistent friend of the North.  In its issue of September 28 a speech made by Bulwer Lytton was summarized and attacked.  The speaker had argued that the dissolution of the Union would be beneficial to all Europe, which had begun to fear the swollen size and strength of the young nation across the Atlantic.  He hoped that the final outcome would be not two, but at least four separate nations, and stated his belief that the friendly emulation of these nations would result for Americans in a rapid advance in art and commerce such as had been produced in the old commonwealths of Greece.  The Spectator answered that such a breaking up of America was much more likely to result in a situation comparable to that in South America, inquired caustically whether Bulwer Lytton had heard that slavery was in question, and asserted that his speech presumably represented the official view of the Tories, and embodied that of the English governing class[342].