We remembered Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston in the British
Government, and their fellow aristocrats in British society; we
remembered the aristocratic British press--The Times notably, because the
most powerful--these are what we saw, felt, and remembered, because they
were not with us, and were able to hurt us in the days when our friends
were not yet able to help us. They made welcome the Southerners who came
over in the interests of the South, they listened to the Southern
propaganda. Why? Because the South was the American version of their
aristocratic creed. To those who came over in the interests of the North
and of the Union they turned a cold shoulder, because they represented
Democracy; moreover, a Dis-United States would prove in commerce a less
formidable competitor. To Captain Bullock, the able and energetic
Southerner who put through in England the building and launching of those
Confederate cruisers which sank our ships and destroyed our merchant
marine, and to Mason and Slidell, the doors of dukes opened pleasantly;
Beecher and our other emissaries mostly had to dine beneath uncoroneted
roofs.

In the pages of Henry Adams, and of Charles Francis Adams his brother,
you can read of what they, as young men, encountered in London, and what
they saw their father have to put up with there, both from English
society and the English Government. Their father was our new minister to
England, appointed by Lincoln. He arrived just after our Civil War had
begun. I have heard his sons talk about it familiarly, and it is all to
be found in their writings.

Nobody knows how to be disagreeable quite so well as the English
gentleman, except the English lady. They can do it with the nicety of a
medicine dropper. They can administer the precise quantum suff. in every