The _London Review_ more moderately stigmatized slavery as the cause,
but was lukewarm in praise of Northern idealisms, regarding the whole
matter as one of diverging economic systems and in any case as
inevitably resulting in dissolution of the Union at some time. The
inevitable might as well come now as later and would result in benefit
to both sections as well as to the world fearing the monstrous empire of
power that had grown up in America[56].

The great bulk of early expressions by the British press was, in truth,
definitely antagonistic to the South, and this was particularly true of
the provincial press. Garrison's _Liberator_, advocating extreme
abolition action, had long made a practice of presenting excerpts from
British newspapers, speeches and sermons in support of its cause. In
1860 there were thirty-nine such citations; in the first months of 1861
many more, all condemning slavery and the South. For the most part these
citations represented a comparatively unknown and uninfluential section,
both in politics and literature, of the British people. Matthew Arnold
was among the first of men of letters to record his faith that secession
was final and, as he hoped, an excellent thing for the North, looking to
the purity of race and the opportunity for unhampered advance[57]. If
English writers were in any way influenced by their correspondents in
the United States they may, indeed, have well been in doubt as to the
origin and prospects of the American quarrel. Hawthorne, but recently at
home again after seven years' consulship in England, was writing that
abolition was not a Northern object in the war just begun. Whittier
wrote to _his_ English friends that slavery, and slavery alone, was the
basic issue[58]. But literary Britain was slow to express itself save in
the Reviews. These, representing varying shades of British upper-class
opinion and presenting articles presumably more profound than the
newspaper editorials, frequently offered more recondite origins of the