exuberant, the man-about-town class, the club-men, the jolly young bachelors, the tavern-politicians, that all the “comic" papers were on that side,—not only the now almost "legitimated" "Punch,"[1] a staid grimalkin which has outgrown the petulances of kitten-hood, or, as it has been well nicknamed erewhile, “The Jackall of the Times," but equally the more free-and-easy "Fun," the plebeian "Comic News," the fashionable "Owl," and the short-lived "Arrow." Among the magazines, the "Quarterly" and "Blackwood," with various others, not all of them colleagues of these two in strict Conservatism, were for the South; “Macmillan's Magazine," again an organ of the advanced and theoretic Liberalism, consistently for the North, so far as it could be considered to express aggregate, and not merely individual, views.
Of our leading writers, taken personally, Carlyle was of course against the North, and perhaps one may say on the side of the South, as shown by his epigram, “The American Iliad in a Nutshell,”—one of the few instances (if I may trust my own opinion concerning so great a genius) in which even his immense power of humor and pointed illustration has fallen flat and let off a firework which merely fizzed without flashing. Ruskin also would appear, from some occasional expressions in what he has published, to have adopted the same view; as, indeed, he very generally does "Carlylize" when Carlylean subject-matter engages his pen. For the North three of the most distinguished and resolute writers have been Mr. John Stuart Mill and Professors Cairnes and Goldwin Smith,—men on whose position and services in their own country to the Federal cause it is assuredly not for me to dilate.
Having thus far, to the best of my ability, sketched the varieties of English opinion concerning the great conflict, I must now endeavor to analyze somewhat more in detail the phases and motives of that large and powerful section of it which was hostile to the North. Something has been already said or implied on this matter as we proceeded; but it remains to be distinctly accounted for. If, at the time when England bestowed cheap tears upon the sorrows of Uncle Tom, cheap aristocratic homage upon Mrs. Stowe, and cheap or indeed gratis advice upon “American sisters,” any American or Continental paper had prophesied (seeing farther into a millstone than Times prophets during the war) that the issues between Slavery and Abolition would, in a very few years, come to a tremendous crisis and not less tremendous arbitrament, and that the great majority of the most trained and influential British opinion would then be found on the side of the champions of Slavery, and against those of Abolition, the prediction would have been universally treated by Englishmen as an emanation and a proof of the most grovelling malignity, not less despicably silly than shamelessly calumnious. The time of trial came; and what no one would have ventured to suggest as conceivable proved to be the actual and positive truth. There must have been some deep-lying reason for this,—some reason which remained latent below the surface as long as the United States were regarded as one integral community, but which asserted itself as soon as Abolition and Slavery became identified, on the one hand, with national indivisibility, and, on the other, with disruption. It seems impossible to doubt, that, had the maintenance or the dissolution of slavery been the sole question, England would have continued true, without any noteworthy defection, to her traditions and professions reprobating slavery; and that as she did not decisively so continue, other
- ↑ Probably many of my American readers are aware that Punch, after doing its little best to make Lincoln ridiculous (which perhaps history will pronounce no easy job) throughout his administration, recanted as soon as he had been murdered, and made the amende honorable in terms as handsome as the case admitted of. It is one more instance of the mania that some writers have for saying ill-natured and unfair things, which they themselves must know to be not the real opinion which they would profess under circumstances when their amour propre becomes enlisted on the same side as candor.
