The continuation of the controversy was not, however, wholly one-sided.  In the silence of the daily press it seemed incumbent upon the more eager and professed friends of the South to take up the cudgels.  Hence, in part, came the organization of the Southern Independence Association and the attempt to hold public meetings favourable to the South, in the early months of 1864.  Much talk had been spent on the “British issue” involved in the war; there was now to be vigorous work to secure it[1385]. The Index plunged into vigorous denunciation of “The Manchester School, which, for convenience and truth, we had better for the future call the American School.”  Even the Government was attacked for its complacence under the “American danger” and for retaining as a member Milner-Gibson, who, in a recent speech, had shown that he shared Bright’s views on democracy: 

“That gentleman [Bright] could not be asked to enter the Cabinet in person.  The country abhorred him; Parliament despised him; his inveterate habits of slander and vituperation, his vulgarity, and his incurable want of veracity, had made him so hateful to the educated classes that it would have required no common courage to give him office; his insolent sneers at royalty would have made his appointment little less than a personal insult to the Queen; and his bad temper would have made him an intolerable colleague in the Council.  But Mr. Bright had another self; a faithful shadow, which had no ideas, no soul, no other existence but what it borrowed from him, while its previous life and education had accustomed it to the society of statesmen and of gentlemen[1386].”

Such expressions gained nothing for the Conservative cause; they were too evidently the result of alarm at the progress of Radical and pro-Northern sentiment.  Goldwin Smith in a “Letter” to the Southern Independence Association, analysed with clarity the situation.  Answering criticisms of the passionate mob spirit of Northern press and people, he accused the Times of having

“... pandered to the hatred of America among the upper classes of this country during the present war.  Some of us at least had been taught by what we have lately seen not to shrink from an extension of the suffrage, if the only bad consequence of that measure of justice would be a change in government from the passions of the privileged class to the passions of the people....  History will not mistake the meaning of the loud cry of triumph which burst from the hearts of all who openly or secretly hated liberty and progress, at the fall, as they fondly supposed, of the Great Republic.”  British working men “are for the most part as well aware that the cause of those who are fighting for the right of labour is theirs, as any nobleman in your Association can be that the other cause in his[1387].”

The question of democracy as a political philosophy and as an institution for Great Britain was, by 1864,