The Saturday Review thought that deeper than declared differences lay the ruling social structure of the South which now visioned a re-opening of the African Slave Trade, and the occupation by slavery of the whole southern portion of North America.  “A more ignoble basis for a great Confederacy it is impossible to conceive, nor one in the long run more precarious....  Assuredly it will be the Northern Confederacy, based on principles of freedom, with a policy untainted by crime, with a free working-class of white men, that will be the one to go on and prosper and become the leader of the New World[54].”  The London Chronicle was vigorous in denunciation.  “No country on the globe produces a blackguardism, a cowardice or a treachery, so consummate as that of the negro-driving States of the new Southern Confederacy”—­a bit of editorial blackguardism in itself[55].  The London Review more moderately stigmatized slavery as the cause, but was lukewarm in praise of Northern idealisms, regarding the whole matter as one of diverging economic systems and in any case as inevitably resulting in dissolution of the Union at some time.  The inevitable might as well come now as later and would result in benefit to both sections as well as to the world fearing the monstrous empire of power that had grown up in America[56].

The great bulk of early expressions by the British press was, in truth, definitely antagonistic to the South, and this was particularly true of the provincial press.  Garrison’s Liberator, advocating extreme abolition action, had long made a practice of presenting excerpts from British newspapers, speeches and sermons in support of its cause.  In 1860 there were thirty-nine such citations; in the first months of 1861 many more, all condemning slavery and the South.  For the most part these citations represented a comparatively unknown and uninfluential section, both in politics and literature, of the British people.  Matthew Arnold was among the first of men of letters to record his faith that secession was final and, as he hoped, an excellent thing for the North, looking to the purity of race and the opportunity for unhampered advance[57].  If English writers were in any way influenced by their correspondents in the United States they may, indeed, have well been in doubt as to the origin and prospects of the American quarrel.  Hawthorne, but recently at home again after seven years’ consulship in England, was writing that abolition was not a Northern object in the war just begun.  Whittier wrote to his English friends that slavery, and slavery alone, was the basic issue[58].  But literary Britain was slow to express itself save in the Reviews.  These, representing varying shades of British upper-class opinion and presenting articles presumably more profound than the newspaper editorials, frequently offered more recondite origins of the American crisis.  The Quarterly Review, organ of extreme Conservatism,