THE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN
between men of the same race, who had lived for three-quarters of a century under the same government, regarded themselves as one nation, and spoke the same language, is essentially a civil war. Defoe's typical Cavalier, who had served in the German wars and returned to fight for the King at Edgehill and Marston Moor, found that the language was the thing which made him realise what civil war meant. "To hear a man cry for quarter in English moved me to a compassion which I had never been used to."
However, it is true that in America the division was mainly a sectional one. The line drawn across the United States by the Missouri Compromise in 1820, in order to limit the northern extension of slavery—known as Mason and Dixon's line—formed a rough boundary between Federal and Confederate States. Even in England there was some tendency to the geographical division of the contending parties. The textbooks say that at the beginning of our war
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