have failed to justify to the full, had a cessation of the war allowed the Confederacy to develop internally, according to its own bias. Rumors were even rife of a possible monarchy; and leading Southerners were credited with the statement, that the best upshot of all, would popular prejudice in the South but allow of it, would be to import a king from the English royal family. Such rumors may have been fallacious, but they were not unacceptable to the British Tory. On the other hand, the disruption of the United States by the secession of the South was continually spoken of as "the breakdown of Democracy," or "the bubble of Democracy has burst." The experiment of a great federative republic—or, one might say, of a great republic, whether federative or otherwise—was held to have been tried, and to have broken down. The fact that there would be two republics, jointly coextensive with the original one, went for little, inasmuch as neither of the two could be as powerful as that one, and they would be divided by conflicting policy and interests, even if not engaged in active hostilities. All these considerations were not only powerful determinants to Southernism, but in themselves balm to the conservative heart, and hardly less so to that overwhelming section of educated liberal opinion in this country, which, genuinely liberal though its politics may be according to the English standard, abhors all approach towards what is termed "Americanizing our institutions," and is fully as eager as the strictly conservative class to lay hold of any facts which may make monarchy appear a stable, and republicanism an unstable system. It was but a very short time before the Fall of Richmond that I heard an Englishman, so far from anticipating the catastrophe of the South, repeat the threadbare augury of the Times and other journals, that the remaining Federal States would yet split up into a Western and an Eastern aggregation. The Cerberus of Democracy was to start his three heads off on three different roads, by that process common in many of the lower animal organisms, known to zoölogists as "fission"; and monarchists were fain to augur that very little of either bite or bark would be thereafter native to his jaws.
Such are the grounds on which I think that British conservatism and soreness produce a widely diffused feeling of national dislike to Americans, and that this dislike, beyond all other motives, indisposed multitudes to the Northern cause. Three other motives conducing to the same result remain to be analyzed.
Many Englishmen believe—as will have been abundantly apparent to Americans during the vicissitudes of the last few years—that the greatness of the United States involves a serious danger to England, whether in the projects upon Canada which are attributed to the States, or in other directions, such as that of naval power. It is no business of mine to discuss the validity of this belief, but simply to record it as one important motive why the success of the Federal Government was not desired. It is a substantial and a reasoned motive; and very few persons, whether in England or out of it, are so cosmopolite or calm-minded as to assume that the growth and aggrandizement of a foreign power, in its proportional relation to one’s own nation, are matter for brotherly satisfaction and congratulation without arrière pensée, provided always that growth proceeds from internal conditions honorable to the foreigner, and not in themselves derogatory or offensive to the home-power. Few will heartily say, "Let our neighbors and competitors develop to their uttermost, and welcome; be it our sole care that we also develop to our uttermost. They shall run us as close as they like, and shall find that we do not mean to be run down." To say this might be an act of national Christianity; but it is not one which has ever been in very active exercise or popular repute. It may be observed, too, that, besides all other causes of national vigilance or jealousy, the Trent affair, at an early date in the war, brought the whole
