humanity and self-interest, to the hounds, only by a compact accepted at
a time when its consequences could not possibly be foreseen. I do not
doubt that the North, on the surface of its will, sincerely desired to
keep this compact; but the South, with an instinct which was really that
of self-preservation, looked, as I am trying to look, beneath the
conscious surface to the unconscious sweep of current. It is not with
reference to the struggle for Western expansion that I call the South
the conservative and constitutional party. There, as it seems to me, the
question was entirely an open one, the power of Congress over
territories being undefined in the Constitution; and no doubt the South,
in the course of the struggle, often took up violent and extravagant
positions. My argument is that the attitude of the North, whatever its
protestations, virtually threatened the institution of slavery in the
old slave States, and that therefore the South had virtual, if not
formal, justification for holding the constitutional compact broken."




THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE

I


Though one of the main objects which I proposed to myself in visiting
America was to take note of American feeling towards England as affected
by the Spanish War, I soon found that, so far as the gathering of
information by way of question and answer was concerned, I might almost
as well have stayed at home. A curious diffidence beset me from the
first. I shrank from recognising that there was any question as to the