in its first article, dwelt upon the failure of democratic institutions, a topic not here treated at length since it will be dealt with in a separate chapter as deserving special study.  The Quarterly is also the first to advance the argument that the protective tariff, advocated by the North, was a real cause for Southern secession[59]; an idea made much of later, by the elements unfriendly to the North, but not hitherto advanced.  In these first issues of the Reviews for 1861, there was frequently put forth the “Southern gentlemen” theory.

“At a distance of three thousand miles, the Southern planters did, indeed, bear a resemblance to the English country gentleman which led to a feeling of kinship and sympathy with him on the part of those in England who represented the old traditions of landed gentility.  This ‘Southern gentleman’ theory, containing as it did an undeniable element of truth, is much harped upon by certain of the reviewers, and one can easily conceive of its popularity in the London Clubs....  The ‘American,’ so familiar to British readers, during the first half of the century, through the eyes of such travellers as Mrs. Trollope, now becomes the ‘Yankee,’ and is located north of Mason and Dixon’s line[60].”

Such portrayal was not characteristic of all Reviews, rather of the Tory organs alone, and the Radical Westminster took pains to deny the truth of the picture, asserting again and again that the vital and sole cause of the conflict was slavery.  Previous articles are summed up in that of October, 1863, as a profession of the Westminster’s opinion throughout:  “... the South are fighting for liberty to found a Slave Power.  Should it prove successful, truer devil’s work, if we may use the metaphor, will rarely have been done[61].”

Fortunate would it have been for the Northern cause, if British opinion generally sympathetic at first on anti-slavery grounds, had not soon found cause to doubt the just basis of its sympathy, from the trend of events in America.  Lincoln had been elected on a platform opposing the further territorial expansion of slavery.  On that point the North was fairly well united.  But the great majority of those who voted for Lincoln would have indignantly repudiated any purpose to take active steps toward the extinction of slavery where it already existed.  Lincoln understood this perfectly, and whatever his opinion about the ultimate fate of slavery if prohibited expansion, he from the first took the ground that the terms of his election constituted a mandate limiting his action.  As secession developed he rightly centred his thought and effort on the preservation of the Union, a duty imposed by his election to the Presidency.