“Our contemporary is all things to all men.  It not only shouts with the largest crowd, according to the Pickwickian philosophy, but with a skill and daring that command admiration, it shouts simultaneously with opposite and contending crowds.  It is everybody’s Times[1215].”

Yet The Index knew, and frequently so stated, that the Times was at bottom pro-Southern.  John Bright’s medium, the Morning Star, said:  “There was something bordering on the sublime in the tremendous audacity of the war news supplied by the Times.  Of course, its prophecies were in a similar style.  None of your doubtful oracles there; none of your double-meaning vaticinations, like that which took poor Pyrrhus in[1216].”  In short, the Times became for the last year of the war the Bible of their faith to Southern sympathizers, and was frequent in its preachments[1217].

There was one journal in London which claimed to have equal if not greater knowledge and authority in military matters.  This was the weekly Army and Navy Gazette, and its editor, W.H.  Russell, in 1861 war correspondent in America of the Times, but recalled shortly after his famous letter on the battle of Bull Run, consistently maintained after the war had ended that he had always asserted the ultimate victory of the North and was, indeed, so pro-Northern in sentiment that this was the real cause of his recall[1218].  He even claimed to have believed in Northern victory to the extent of re-union.  These protestations after the event are not borne out by the columns of the Gazette, for that journal was not far behind the Times in its delineation of incidents unfavourable to the North and in its all-wise prophecies of Northern disaster.  The Gazette had no wide circulation except among those in the service, but its dicta, owing to the established reputation of Russell and to the specialist nature of the paper, were naturally quite readily accepted and repeated in the ordinary press.  Based on a correct appreciation of man power and resources the Gazette did from time to time proclaim its faith in Northern victory[1219], but always in such terms as to render possible a hedge on expressed opinion and always with the assertion that victory would not result in reunion.  Russell’s most definite prophecy was made on July 30, 1864: 

“The Southern Confederacy, like Denmark, is left to fight by itself, without even a conference or an armistice to aid it; and it will be strange indeed if the heroism, endurance, and resources of its soldiers and citizens be not eventually dominated by the perseverance and superior means of the Northern States.  Let us repeat our profession of faith in the matter.  We hold that the Union perished long ago, and that its component parts can never again be welded into a Confederacy of self-governing States, with a common executive, army, fleet, and central