The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 | Page 9

behind; but also that this tolerance was in most instances factitious and occasional, and is cleared or clearing away, and will leave the British reprobation of slavery, in a little while, pretty nearly where it used to be of old. The orange has been squeezed: what use can the rind be of? It rests with the re-United States, by a just and successful treatment of the still formidable negro question,[B] to persuade unreluctant minds in the Old Country that slavery is, in very deed, the unmitigated wrong and nuisance which they used to reckon it; and those who have sympathized with the North look confidently for this ultimate result.
As a corollary to all that I have been saying in this slight analysis of English opinion during the war, I should add,--what, indeed, American writers have abundantly observed,--that the knowledge of American affairs possessed by the great mass of English partisans was extremely superficial. I will not now speak of our newspapers and pamphleteers; but, within my own experience, among ordinary persons, who were quite ready to take sides, and stand stubbornly to their colors, I have often found that even such rudimentary points as the distinction between "States" and "Territories," the Northern resistance to the extension of slavery into Territories, the issue taken on that immediate question in the Presidential election of 1860, the relation between the three Federal Government and the States' governments, and the limits within which it would be possible for a President and his administration, however anti-slavery in principle, to interfere with slavery, were either not understood in theory, or not practically laid to heart. People would talk as if a Federal President were a Russian autocrat, who, if sincerely opposed to slavery, would have nothing in the world to do except to cancel the "peculiar institution" throughout the States, North and South, by a motion of his will and a stroke of his pen. They would demonstrate the half-heartedness on this matter of the North, as represented by its President Lincoln, and the hypocrisy or truckling of Lincoln himself, by the omission of such a sealing of their professed faith,--not caring to reflect how utterly subversive these notions must be of that favorite catchword of Southern partisans; "State rights." It may be objected, "These people can have been only the extremely ignorant." That, however, is my own conviction: but such childish assumptions were not the less prevalent for being preposterous, nor the less potent in leavening the mass of opinion, when the question was, which party to adopt.
Something--but necessarily very brief and imperfect--may be added concerning the particular organs of public opinion which sided with the North or with the South. I shall confine myself to London publications, not knowing enough of those in the country to treat that subject even with fairness, much less with command of the materials. I presume, however, that the tone of the London press furnishes a tolerable index to that of the provincial, taking the whole average.
The political color of the English press may be summarized as either Conservative, Liberal, or Liberal-Conservative. The Conservative daily papers are the "Standard" and the "Herald," both rabidly Southern. The principal Liberal ones are the "Times," "Globe," "Telegraph," "Daily News," and "Star." Of these five journals, three were for the South, and only two for the North,--the two which I have named last. Two other Liberal daily papers are but little known to me,--the "Advertiser" and the "Sun": I believe the latter was at any rate not decidedly Southern. Everybody knows that the Times is the Englishman's paper par excellence; it would hardly be unfair to call us "a Times-led population," unless, indeed, one prefers the term, "a popularity-led Times." Converse with ten ordinary middle-class Englishmen,--men of business or position, receiving or imparting the current of opinion which is uppermost in their class,--probably nine of them will express views which you will find amplified in the columns of the Times. That journal is neither above their level nor below it; as matters strike them, so do they also strike the Times. Englishmen do not particularly respect the Times; it is like them, (or in especial like the bustling, energetic, money-making, money-spending classes of them,) and they are like it; but an Englishman of this sort will not feel bound to "look up to" the Times any more than to another Englishman of the same class. They reciprocally express each other, and with no obligation or claim to lofty regard on either side. When, therefore, one finds the Times abiding for a long while (which is not invariably its way) by one constant view of a question, one may be sure that it is supported in that view by an active, business-like, prominent, and probably even predominant body of its countrymen; but it by