and with which in this matter Conservative leaders like Disraeli and Sir Stafford Northcote entirely concurred, was at the very least free from grave reproach.  Lord John Russell, and, there can be little doubt, his colleagues generally, regarded slavery as an “accursed institution,” but they felt no anger with the people of the South for it, because, as he said, “we gave them that curse and ours were the hands from which they received that fatal gift”; in Lord John at least the one overmastering sentiment upon the outbreak of the war was that of sheer pain that “a great Republic, which has enjoyed institutions under which the people have been free and happy, is placed in jeopardy.”  Their insight into American affairs did not go deep; but the more seriously we rate “the strong antipathy to the North, the strong sympathy with the South, and the passionate wish to have cotton,” of which a Minister, Lord Granville, wrote at the time, the greater is the credit due both to the Government as a whole and to Disraeli for having been conspicuously unmoved by these considerations; and “the general approval from Parliament, the press, and the public,” which, as Lord Granville added, their policy received, is creditable too.  It is perfectly true, as will be seen later, that at one dark moment in the fortunes of the North, the Government very cautiously considered the possibility of intervention, but Disraeli, to whom a less patriotic course would have offered a party advantage, recalled to them their own better judgment; and it is impossible to read their correspondence on this question without perceiving that in this they were actuated by no hostility to the North, but by a sincere belief that the cause of the North was hopeless and that intervention, with a view to stopping bloodshed, might prove the course of honest friendship to all America.  Englishmen of a later time have become deeply interested in America, and may wish that their fathers had better understood the great issue of the Civil War, but it is matter for pride, which in honesty should be here asserted, that with many selfish interests in this contest, of which they were most keenly aware, Englishmen, in their capacity as a nation, acted with complete integrity.

But for our immediate purpose the object of thus reviewing a subject on which American historians have lavished much research is to explain the effect produced in America by demonstrations of strong antipathy and sympathy in England.  The effect in some ways has been long lasting.  The South caught at every mark of sympathy with avidity, was led by its politicians to expect help, received none, and became resentful.  It is surprising to be told, but may be true, that the embers of this resentment became dangerous to England in the autumn of 1914.  In the North the memory of an antipathy which was almost instantly perceived has burnt deep—­as many memoirs, for instance those recently published by Senator Lodge, show—­into the minds of precisely those Americans