To these feelings on the subject maybe added another, which was natural enough though perhaps not noble.  “These western cocks have crowed loudly,” we said; “too loudly for the comfort of those who live after all at no such great distance from them.  It is well that their combs should be clipped.  Cocks who crow so very loudly are a nuisance.  It might have gone so far that the clipping would become a work necessarily to be done from without.  But it is ten times better for all parties that it should be done from within; and as the cocks are now clipping their own combs, in God’s name let them do it, and the whole world will be the quieter.”  That, I say, was not a very noble idea; but it was natural enough, and certainly has done somewhat in mitigating that grief which the horrors of civil war and the want of cotton have caused to us in England.

Such certainly had been my belief as to the country.  I speak here of my opinion as to the ultimate success of secession and the folly of the war, repudiating any concurrence of my own in the ignoble but natural sentiment alluded to in the last paragraph.  I certainly did think that the Northern States, if wise, would have let the Southern States go.  I had blamed Buchanan as a traitor for allowing the germ of secession to make any growth; and as I thought him a traitor then, so do I think him a traitor now.  But I had also blamed Lincoln, or rather the government of which Mr. Lincoln in this matter is no more than the exponent, for his efforts to avoid that which is inevitable.  In this I think that I—­or as I believe I may say we, we Englishmen—­were wrong.  I do not see how the North, treated as it was and had been, could have submitted to secession without resistance.  We all remember what Shakspeare says of the great armies which were led out to fight for a piece of ground not large enough to cover the bodies of those who would be slain in the battle; but I do not remember that Shakspeare says that the battle was on this account necessarily unreasonable.  It is the old point of honor which, till it had been made absurd by certain changes of circumstances, was always grand and usually beneficent.  These changes of circumstances have altered the manner in which appeal may be made, but have not altered the point of honor.  Had the Southern States sought to obtain secession by constitutional means, they might or might not have been successful; but if successful, there would have been no war.  I do not mean to brand all the Southern States with treason, nor do I intend to say that, having secession at heart, they could have obtained it by constitutional means.  But I do intend to say that, acting as they did, demanding secession not constitutionally, but in opposition to the constitution, taking upon themselves the right of breaking up a nationality of which they formed only a part, and doing that without consent of the other part, opposition from the North and war was an inevitable consequence.