of the North, and in the experiences of Englishmen trading with or investing in the North, which did not impress them favourably.  Many Northerners discovered something snobbish and unsound in this preference, but they were not quite right.  With this leaning, Englishmen readily accepted the plea of the South that it was threatened with intolerable interference; indeed to this day it is hardly credible to Englishmen that the grievance against which the South arose in such passionate revolt was so unsubstantial as it really was.  On the other hand, the case of the North was not apprehended.  How it came to pass, in the intricate and usually uninteresting play of American politics, that a business community, which had seemed pretty tolerant of slavery, was now at war on some point which was said to be and said not to be slavery, was a little hard to understand.  Those of us who remember our parents’ talk of the American Civil War did not hear from them the true and fairly simple explanation of the war, that the North fought because it refused to connive further in the extension of slavery, and would not—­could not decently—­accept the disruption of a great country as the alternative.  It is strictly true that the chivalrous South rose in blind passion for a cause at the bottom of which lay the narrowest of pecuniary interests, while the over-sharp Yankees, guided by a sort of comic backwoodsman, fought, whether wisely or not, for a cause as untainted as ever animated a nation in arms.  But it seems a paradox even now, and there is no reproach in the fact, that our fathers, who had not followed the vacillating course of Northern politics hitherto, did not generally take it in.  We shall see in a later chapter how Northern statesmanship added to their perplexity.  But it is impossible not to be ashamed of some of the forms in which English feeling showed itself and was well known in the North to show itself.  Not only the articles of some English newspapers, but the private letters of Americans who then found themselves in the politest circles in London, are unpleasant to read now.  It is painful, too, that a leader of political thought like Cobden should even for a little while—­and it was only a little while—­have been swayed in such a matter by a sympathy relatively so petty as agreement with the Southern doctrine of Free Trade.  We might now call it worthier of Prussia than of England that a great Englishman like Lord Salisbury (then Lord Robert Cecil) should have expressed friendship for the South as a good customer of ours, and antagonism for the North as a rival in our business.  When such men as these said such things they were, of course, not brutally indifferent to right, they were merely blind to the fact that a very great and plain issue of right and wrong was really involved in the war.  Gladstone, to take another instance, was not blind to that, but with irritating misapprehension he protested against the madness of plunging into war to propagate the cause of emancipation.