“The gradual change of his language and of his policy was most remarkable.  Englishmen learnt to respect a man who showed the best characteristics of their race in his respect for what is good in the past, acting in unison with a recognition of what was made necessary by the events of passing history[1295].”

This was first reaction.  Two days later, commenting on the far warmer expressions of horror and sympathy emanating from all England, there appeared another and longer editorial: 

“If anything could mitigate the distress of the American people in their present affliction, it might surely be the sympathy which is expressed by the people of this country.  We are not using the language of hyperbole in describing the manifestation of feeling as unexampled.  Nothing like it has been witnessed in our generation....  But President Lincoln was only the chief of a foreign State, and of a State with which we were not infrequently in diplomatic or political collision.  He might have been regarded as not much more to us than the head of any friendly Government, and yet his end has already stirred the feelings of the public to their uttermost depths.”

* * * * *

“... a space of twenty-four hours has sufficed not only to fill the country with grief and indignation, but to evoke almost unprecedented expressions of feeling from constituted bodies.  It was but on Wednesday that the intelligence of the murder reached us, and on Thursday the Houses of Lords and Commons, the Corporation of the City of London, and the people of our chief manufacturing towns in public meeting assembled had recorded their sentiments or expressed their views.  In the House of Lords the absence of precedent for such a manifestation was actually made the subject of remark.

“That much of this extraordinary feeling is due to the tragical character of the event and the horror with which the crime is regarded is doubtless true, nor need we dissemble the the fact that the loss which the Americans have sustained is also thought our own loss in so far as one valuable guarantee for the amity of the two nations may have been thus removed.  But, upon the whole, it is neither the possible embarrassment of international relations nor the infamous wickedness of the act itself which has determined public feeling.  The preponderating sentiment is sincere and genuine sympathy—–­ sorrow for the chief of a great people struck down by an assassin, and sympathy for that people in the trouble which at a crisis of their destinies such a catastrophe must bring.  Abraham Lincoln was as little of a tyrant as any man who ever lived.  He could have been a tyrant had he pleased, but he never uttered so much as an ill-natured speech....  In all America there was, perhaps, not one man who less deserved to be the victim of this revolution than he who has just fallen[1296].”