"... The Jockey Club is composed of the 'best people' of
South Carolina--rich planters and the like. It represents,
therefore, the 'gentlemanly interest' and not a bit of
universal suffrage."

It would be idle to assume that either in South Carolina or in England
there was, in February, 1860, any serious thought of a resumption of
colonial relations, though W.H. Russell, correspondent of the _Times_,
reported in the spring, 1861, that he frequently heard the same
sentiment in the South[50]. For general official England, as for the
press, the truth is that up to the time of the secession of South
Carolina no one really believed that a final rupture was about to take
place between North and South. When, on December 20, 1860, that State in
solemn convention declared the dissolution "of the Union now existing
between South Carolina and the other States, under the name of the
'United States of America,'" and when it was understood that other
Southern States would soon follow this example, British opinion believed
and hoped that the rupture would be accomplished peaceably. Until it
became clear that war would ensue, the South was still damned by the
press as seeking the preservation of an evil institution. Slavery was
even more vigorously asserted as the ignoble and sole cause. In the
number for April, 1861, the _Edinburgh Review_ attributed the whole
difficulty to slavery, asserted that British sympathy would be with the
anti-slavery party, yet advanced the theory that the very dissolution of
the Union would hasten the ultimate extinction of slavery since economic
competition with a neighbouring free state, the North, would compel the
South itself to abandon its beloved "domestic institution[51]."

Upon receipt of the news from South Carolina, the _Times_, in a long and