suffering. Yet those thousands bore it. They somehow looked through
Lincoln's express disavowal of any intention to interfere with slavery,
and saw that at bottom our war was indeed against slavery, that slavery
was behind the Southern camouflage about independence, and behind the
Northern slogan about preserving the Union. They saw and they stuck.
"Rarely," writes Charles Francis Adams, "in the history of mankind, has
there been a more creditable exhibition of human sympathy." France was
likewise damaged by our blockade; and Napoleon III would have liked to
recognize the South. He established, through Maximilian, an empire in
Mexico, behind which lay hostility to our Democracy. He wished us defeat;
but he was afraid to move without England, to whom he made a succession
of indirect approaches. These nearly came to something towards the close
of 1862. It was on October 7th that Gladstone spoke at Newcastle about
Jefferson Davis having made a nation. Yet, after all, England didn't
budge, and thus held Napoleon back. From France in the end the South got
neither ships nor recognition, in spite of his deceitful connivance and
desire; Napoleon flirted a while with Slidell, but grew cold when he saw
no chance of English cooperation.

Besides John Bright and Cobden, we had other English friends of influence
and celebrity: John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, Goldwin Smith, Leslie
Stephen, Robert Gladstone, Frederic Harrison are some of them. All from
the first supported us. All from the first worked and spoke for us. The
Union and Emancipation Society was founded. "Your Committee," says its
final report when the war was ended, "have issued and circulated upwards
of four hundred thousand books, pamphlets, and tracts... and nearly five
hundred official and public meetings have been held..." The president of
this Society, Mr. Potter, spent thirty thousand dollars in the cause, and
at a time when times were hard and fortunes as well as cotton-spinners in
distress through our blockade. Another member of the Society, Mr.