Did the British public hold these same opinions?  There is no direct evidence available in sufficient quantity in autobiography or letters upon which to base a conclusion.  Such works are silent on the struggle in America for the first few months and presumably public opinion, less informed even than the press, received its impressions from the journals customarily read.  Both at this period and all through the war, also, it should be remembered, clearly, that most newspapers, all the reviews, in fact nearly all vehicles of British expression, were in the early ’sixties “in the hands of the educated classes, and these educated classes corresponded closely with the privileged classes.”  The more democratic element of British Society lacked any adequate press representation of its opinions.  “This body could express itself by such comparatively crude methods as public meetings and demonstrations, but it was hampered in literary and political expression[42].”  The opinion of the press was then, presumably, the opinion of the majority of the educated British public.

Thus British comment on America took the form, at first of moralizations, now severe toward the South, now indifferent, yet very generally asserting the essential justice of the Northern position.  But it was early evident that the newspapers, one and all, were quite unprepared for the determined front soon put up by South Carolina and other Southern States.  Surprised by the violence of Southern declarations, the only explanation found by the British press was that political control had been seized by the uneducated and lawless element.  The Times characterized this element of the South as in a state of deplorable ignorance comparable with that of the Irish peasantry, a “poor, proud, lazy, excitable and violent class, ever ready with knife and revolver[43].”  The fate of the Union, according to the Saturday Review, was in the hands of the “most ignorant, most unscrupulous, and most lawless [class] in the world—­the poor or mean whites of the Slave States[44].”  Like judgments were expressed by the Economist and, more mildly, by the Spectator[45].  Subsequently some of these journals found difficulty in this connection, in swinging round the circle to expressions of admiration for the wise and powerful aristocracy of the South; but all, especially the Times, were skilled by long practice in the journalistic art of facing about while claiming perfect consistency.  In denial of a Southern right of secession, also, they were nearly a unit[46], though the Saturday Review argued the case for the South, making a pointed parallel between the present situation and that of the American Colonies in seceding from England[47].