Then came in his love of small states, and from his mouth, while he was a Cabinet Minister, came the impulsive pronouncement, bitterly regretted by him and bitterly resented in the North:  “Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made—­what is more than either—­they have made a nation.”  Many other Englishmen simply sympathised with the weaker side; many too, it should be confessed, with the apparently weaker side which they were really persuaded would win. ("Win the battles,” said Lord Robert Cecil to a Northern lady, “and we Tories shall come round at once.”) These things are recalled because their natural effect in America has to be understood.  What is really lamentable is not that in this distant and debatable affair the sympathy of so many inclined to the South, but that, when at least there was a Northern side, there seemed at first to be hardly any capable of understanding or being stirred by it.  Apart from politicians there were only two Englishmen of the first rank, Tennyson and Darwin, who, whether or not they understood the matter in detail, are known to have cared from their hearts for the Northern cause.  It is pleasant to associate with these greater names that of the author of “Tom Brown.”  The names of those hostile to the North or apparently quite uninterested are numerous and surprising.  Even Dickens, who had hated slavery, and who in “Martin Chuzzlewit” had appealed however bitterly to the higher national spirit which he thought latent in America, now, when that spirit had at last and in deed asserted itself, gave way in his letters to nothing but hatred of the whole country.  And a disposition like this—­explicable but odious—­did no doubt exist in the England of those days.

There is, however, quite another aspect of this question besides that which has so painfully impressed many American memories.  When the largest manufacturing industry of England was brought near to famine by the blockade, the voice of the stricken working population was loudly and persistently uttered on the side of the North.  There has been no other demonstration so splendid of the spirit which remains widely diffused among individual English working men and which at one time animated labour as a concentrated political force.  John Bright, who completely grasped the situation in America, took a stand, in which J. S. Mill, W. E. Forster, and the Duke of Argyll share his credit, but which did peculiar and great honour to him as a Quaker who hated war.  But there is something more that must be said.  The conduct of the English Government, supported by the responsible leaders of the Opposition, was at that time, no less than now, the surest indication of the more deep-seated feelings of the real bulk of Englishmen on any great question affecting our international relations; and the attitude of the Government, in which Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister and Lord John Russell Foreign Secretary,