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 difficult to form an opinion, or even a guess, on the question of relative numbers; but I have always fancied, that, could the whole nation have been polled on the subject, the number of Northern well-wishers would have been found sensibly to exceed that of the Southern. Generally, men of very grave, reflective, and unprejudiced minds, students in the philosophy of society and history, men known for their lofty ideal of liberty or of culture, appeared to be on the side of the North; and the calm, unfaltering attitude, free from petulance and invective, of those operative classes in Lancashire, whom the war ruined for a while, has often been pointed to as showing that the more informed and intelligent working men were also for the North. They endured a great calamity without murmuring, because they thought the cause just which had entailed that calamity upon them. Assuming this to be correct, as I believe it to be, the question remains, What was the opinion (or perhaps one should rather say the sentiment) of the class below this,—the great numerical bulk of the population, who would take sides according as their sympathies, imaginations, prejudices, or traditional conceptions of the right might be roused, irrespectively in the main of reasoning as to any antecedents or consequences? I incline to suppose that the most powerful impulsion to the feelings of this class must have been that strong anti-slavery sentiment which had undoubtedly for many years been bone of the bone of Englishmen,—more powerful even than that sympathy for an overmatched struggle on behalf of independence which would have pleaded for the South. If this is a correct view, it may be inferred that the majority of the poorer classes was for the North; as they, without reﬁning over the question, would regard the contest as one between Slavery and Anti-slavery, the latter represented by the North and the former by the South. Short, however, of some decided majority for the North in these classes, whose views do not transpire much upon the surface of English opinion, I fear the majority of the whole nation would have been found to be with the South; and could I take my own sphere of society as the criterion, I should be compelled to say that so it was in overwhelming preponderance. A more diffused connection with America, through the emigration movement, and through community of interest and feeling with a democratic nation, may have combined with a truer instinct of right in the popular heart to rectify the balance; and in default of evidence to the contrary. I am fain to suppose it did.—A few words must be added as to one branch of our immediate subject,—the doubt or disbelief of the sincerity of the North on the question of Slavery. Had no prejudice or perversity of argument been imported into the subject, it would, I imagine, have been apparent to most of my countrymen that the dominant party at the North was genuinely antagonistic to slavery; that, as long as the South did not violate the Federal Constitution, the North was trammelled from interfering with slavery as already established by law in certain States; that the duty immediately imposed upon the North and the Government by the act of Secession was one and undivided,—the maintenance of the Constitution and of the Union; but that, in proportion to the obstinacy of Southern resistance, the antagonism to slavery would obtain free play in the North, the slavery question would assume greater and greater prominence as the nexus of the whole debate, and those who had at first been bound to make a stand for an extant Union and compromise would be impelled and more than willing to fight on for reunion and abolition. But this view of the matter was consistently distorted. The constitutionalism and nationalism of the North ﬁgured in argument as indifference to slavery, the steps taken towards the emancipation of slaves as mere hypocritical stratagems of war, and the climax of disingenuousness was reached when the anti-conscription and anti-negro riots of