Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/140

 will to this day not blush to deny, that the question of Slavery was the real substantial incentive to secession, and who paraded the minor questions of tariffs, the conflicting interests of the productive and the manufacturing States, and the like. These arguments the writer leaves unfingered; it is no business of his to fray their delicate texture. All he has to say of them here is, that, as he does not value them at a pin’s fee as representing the main point at issue, they in no way affected the feelings which he entertained concerning the war. Again, there were remonstrants of a still more impracticable frame of mind, who could see the right, absolute or potential, of any despotic or constitutional monarchy, or any conquering power, to suppress secession and revolt, but could not conceive that any similar right pertained to the central government of a federative republic. To hear them, the will of a national majority was of no account in a national issue, provided the majority of any particular State of the federation took the contrary side. The national majority had no rights such as the strong arm of the law, or the armed force, ought to impose upon gainsayers: it was only the national minority which had such rights. The latter might break up the nation; the former must not enforce any veto upon the disruption. Why elect a President as your governmental chief, if you mean that government should be a reality? Why not be respectable, like us Europeans, and have a King at once? Such, brieﬂy interpreted, appears to have been the quintessence of the wisdom of these political sages.

The writer has now done with the exposition of his own views,—of no consequence assuredly to his American readers, save for the clearer understanding of what he has to say concerning the views entertained by his British countrymen at large. He has also done with the few specimens which it fell in his way to cite of objections urged against his colleagues in opinion, and which he was obtuse enough to imagine to be no objections at all. He proceeds to his main subject,—the varieties of English opinion on the American War.

These varieties may perhaps, with some approach to completeness, be defined under the following seven heads.

1st. The party which believed in the sincerity, the right, and the probable eventual success of the North.

2d. That which believed in the right of the North, but which doubted or disbelieved its sincerity, especially on the question of Slavery, or its eventual success, or both.

3d. That which cared only for the anti-slavery aspect of the contest.

4th. That which believed in the right and the probable eventual success of the South.

5th. That which believed in the right of the South, but which doubted or disbelieved its eventual success.

6th. That which, contrariwise, believed in the eventual success of the South, but doubted or disbelieved its right.

7th. That which covertly or avowedly justified slavery.

To each of these parties a few words of comment must be given.

1st. The party which believed in the sincerity, the right, and the probable eventual success of the North was, I think, extremely small during the greater part of the war,—say, between the first Battle of Bull Run and the capture of Atlanta. By sincerity I mean such points as these: that the Federal Government was honestly desirous of fulfilling its obligations towards the South; that the North, having to maintain the integrity of the country by force of arms, was ready to make all needful sacrifices for that object, and to lavish its blood and treasure; above all, that the professions of dislike to slavery, the offer of military emancipation to negroes, and, ﬁnally, the efforts to amend the Constitution so as to abolish slavery, root and branch, were sincere. Many, of course, believed in the right of the North, and in one or other of these items of sincerity; few, I think, in the right, in the sincerity throughout, and