age and early successes of the South, had once roused strong feelings in its favor. The earlier argumentative view as to majorities and minorities, and the fundamental basis of all governments, sank into desuetude, while the right of a compact community to independent self-government at its own option occupied the field of vision. Vast numbers of people—I should think, during the greater part of the war, four fifths of the whole country—believed in the success of the South; considering it impossible that so determined a community, with so vast a territory, should ever be coerced into reunion, and not being prepared for an equal amount of determination on the part of the Northern Government and people, or for their capacity, even had the will been admitted, to meet the required outlay in money and men. Another question, too, was prominent in men's minds, and indisposed them to contemplating a subjugated South. They would ask, “What is to be done with the South, on the unlikely supposition of its being conquered? Is it to become an American Poland?” All these considerations inclined the great majority of the nation to believe that the South would succeed; and, of those who so believed, a large proportion held the Southerners to be in the right, or sympathized with them to a degree which obscured the strict question of right in favor of preference.
5th. The party which believed in the right of the South, but which doubted or disbelieved its eventual success, appears to me to have been most inconsiderable up to the final stages of the war. I doubt whether I ever met two men, prior, let me say, to Sherman’s march through Georgia, who would distinctly limit themselves to this: "I wish the South might succeed, but I don’t think it will." When the impending catastrophe of the South was no longer disputable, the Saturday Review, the idol of our Club-men and University-men, of those who are at once highly cultivated and intensely English, and who fancy themselves freer from prejudice and more large-minded than others in proportion to their incapacity to perceive that their own prejudices are prejudices,—a paper which had "gone in for" the South with a vehemence only balanced by its virulence against the North,—found it convenient to turn tail, and retort upon those opponents with whom the laugh remained at last. The Saturday Review bleated pitifully, yet unconfessingly, to this effect:—"True it is that we have been backing up the South all the while; but we meant no more by it than the backer of any prize-fighter or any race-horse means, when he has made his choice, and staked his money, and shouts to the adopted competitor, ‘Go in and win!’ That backer does not necessarily believe that his side will be the winner, but only signalizes that that side is his." The evasion came too late; persons who had inconvenient memories saw through the shuffling of a pseudoprophet, who only managed to cast a retrospective gleam of insincerity over his fortune-telling, to convert blunder into bad faith, and to stultify his present along with his past position. The leek had to be eaten at last: why, after so many “prave ’ords" of superiority and defiance, confess that the eating of it had been more than half foreseen all along?
6th. The party which believed in the eventual success of the South, but doubted or disbelieved its right, must have been pretty considerable, if my previous estimates are true; for I have already advanced the conjecture that more than half the nation sided with the North, while four fifths believed for a long time in the success of the South. This fact alone, if correctly alleged, furnishes tolerable evidence of the persistency and influence of pro-Southern papers and partisans, and their ingenuity in so misreading the facts,
"Chè il no e il sì nel capo ci tenzona."
The event has proved that the chances of success were really very much on the side of the North. The superiority in material resources, and certain solid and undeniable successes obtained at an early stage of the war, such as the
