judged from these prejudiced or excitable people. Its character was just as truly exemplified by the cotton operatives of Lancashire. These men were at the close of 1861 the class to whom above all others the Civil War meant actual hunger; so they tightened their belts over their hungry bellies, and declared that not if they could help it should the cause of the slaves suffer injury for the sake of that cotton trade which meant South Lancashire's daily bread.

In point of fact, of course, the silent but dominating mass of quiet Englishmen, more of whom were akin to those workingmen than to families which could be called aristocratic, cut no such heroic figure. It was puzzled and it was unimaginative, and being puzzled it was somewhat suspicious. But, in its unvocal way it demanded and it got from its government a policy which was at least honest, and it was never largely swayed by any motive which was not clean and honorable.

Any reader who may wish to study this matter in detail will find a fine chapter dealing with one portion of it in Mr. G. M. Trevelyan's Life of John Bright. He will find the whole story well handled from the English point of view in the late Mr. Herbert Paul's History of Modern England, a book which is, I think, too little known. But, above all, he will find it set out, with painstaking and accurate but luminous wealth of detail, and with a judgment which is generally acute and always human and generous, in a great American book, the History of the United States from 1850 to (I hope eventually a very recent year) by Mr. James Ford Rhodes (Macmillan Co.).

The broad facts are well known. Patriotic men in the North, at the crisis of their country's fate, looked to England for sympathy, and got hardly any;

they got on the contrary from a surprising and distressing number of quarters plentiful scolding for all the sins of their past, and galling, if natural, misunderstanding of their every action. This is what really hurt; but, inevitably almost, there followed repeated and dangerous collisions, arising from our country's situation as a neutral; and once or twice our government contemplated a foolish intervention, which continued to be pressed upon them by a noisy section in Parliament right up to the time of the really decisive struggles at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. After the war came the long dispute which ended with the arbitration over the claim of damages for the escape of the Alabama and other Southern cruisers from British shipyards.

From the moment that Lord John Russell, who was personally sensitive on this particular matter, left office, there can be little doubt that in this last dispute the balance of credit lay with the British Government, though our fullest acknowledgments are due to Grant, to Hamilton Fish still more, and above all to C. F. Adams. Americans cannot now read with pride the once famous speech of Charles Sumner on this subject— though it is an extraordinary fact that he thought it made for conciliation, and Sir Stafford Northcote, then in Washington, was not displeased at it. On the other hand, they would probably read the speech of Lord Stanley, the Foreign Secretary under his father Lord Derby, as a worthy utterance of international statesmanship. But we need say little of American extravagances in this dispute; for it was America that had suffered.

I dwell upon these ancient misunderstandings because they played an important part in reviving a certain force of ill-w ll against this country,

which I fancy had previously been dying down, but which, for all the efforts of a great number of representative Americans, is alive to-day. It is for an Englishman to be aware of its existence but not to profess to be able to analyze or to measure it. So I shall say no more of its serious aspect, but I may be allowed to glance at its occasionally amusing features.

So late as the year 1896 a gentleman in Boston thought it worth while to expose the real malignity of the English in a little volume reproducing with a running commentary Punch's cartoons of Lincoln. In particular he found proof of the poisonous hatred of all Englishmen for America in the fact that Punch sometimes portrayed Lincoln as an animal with human features. He may not have known that every prominent English statesman then and since has received the same treatment at the hands of our caricaturists with good nature and often with pleasure. But he must really have known that, while Lincoln lived, highly cultivated and most loyal people in Boston were at least as unappreciative of him as the English.

I have opened up a wide field of controversy, in much of which, of course, proof is impossible. Moreover, in some points of detail concerning this country an older American, born as I was only a few months before Lincoln died, might well be able to correct me. But I am sure that in treating this subject American writers are prone to a kind of oversight which is not confined to history — an oversight continually and most harmfully occurring in the international relations of year by year and month by month. They attribute altogether too small a part in human affairs to sheer honest misunderstanding.

In their picture of the events of that time there lurks, I fancy, in the background, the spectre of an England

or rather of a supposed sharply distinct governing class in England — eagerly watching and ever upon the pounce (though why it did not pounce when its time came has never been satisfactorily explained). This governing class -not some empty-headed, talkative individuals in it, but the whole base, aristocratic crowd- desires the downfall of the United States both as a trade rival and as a republic. In this picture, which I think radically false, they would freely admit that there is some exaggeration - indeed the margin of difference between myself and my critic is perhaps not so large as I suppose.

But I am sure that few Americans, looking at the England of that day, or even at the England of this day, escape the influence of certain subtle misconceptions about this country socially and politically; I seem to detect constantly the presence of a certain superstition attaching to the word 'aristocracy' and in some degree to the supposed monarchical principle.' Englishmen are subject to similar confusions about America, but I think they escape from them more easily.

6

In writing of that time an American is pretty certain to make mistakes as to who or what was representative of England. He will be unaware of a difference, then more marked than now, between London and England. He will inevitably think of the Lord Robert Cecil of 1861 as a great nobleman about to be Prime Minister and not as a brilliant young free lance, honorably maintaining himself by the use of a mordant pen and advancing himself by the use of a most irresponsible tongue. He will not be aware that the then Lord Derby, actually a great nobleman at the time, had far more ties of sympathy with the workingmen of Lancashire than most great American capitalists have with their

working class. He will not seek for a typical representative of the then actual governing class (when in its habitual sober senses) in a plain country gentleman like Sir Stafford Northcote, or notice the conduct of Mr. Disraeli as that of the keenest observer of the public mind. Going back a very few years earlier, he will possibly imagine that the Tory statesman, Sir Robert Peel, who was far the strongest man in England, was a man of patrician lineage. In short, the structure of the strange body politic of this old country is apt to escape his analysis. Still more perhaps will he readily misjudge the motives which appealed to its mind. Gravely and seriously an admirable American writer tells us that the English were drawn toward the South by a false belief that Southern gentlemen had aristocratic pedigrees.

Now we here know something of our own elders; many of them were rather snobbish, more of them were not; some of them had inherited pedigrees of their own or bought them with their own honestly earned money; but with none of them can an interest in anybody else's pedigree possibly have had a powerful influence. What is true is that Englishmen were and are (and, I imagine, with reason) often attracted by a certain indefinable quality in Southerners, which has been best described by Frederick Law Olmsted, a certain charm in social intercourse, which we English do not attribute to ourselves.

There are several points at which this otherwise nebulous question can be brought to the test. And, first, it is undeniable that Northern feeling was naturally enraged by a series of overt acts by our neutral government, in the light of which Americans have regarded the matter ever since, but in which they are now aware that (apart from mere clumsiness and administra

tive blunders) our government was quite right or at least quite innocent. For example, the early recognition of belligerent rights on the part of the Confederacy was a very stinging thing to the North, and it was actually proposed later on by Sumner that huge damages should be claimed from us for it. But it was certainly the duty of our government in accordance with American legal authorities; it facilitated greatly our full recognition (against our own interests) of the blockade; it was welcomed upon consideration by the stanchest friends of the North here, such as W. E. Forster; and Sumner's idea, that it set on its legs what would otherwise have been an impotent uprising, is now manifestly absurd.

The Trent affair, again, was most exasperating, but there was room for exasperation on our side and we were in the right. The Alabama affair was disastrous and to certain individual Englishmen disgraceful, but no blame was attributed to the Minister concerned, Lord Russell, except that, which he freely acknowledged in the end, of slowness and meticulous legality, and the incredible fact is true that the harm would never have occurred if a high legal functionary had not chosen a most inconvenient moment for, literally, going mad.

Secondly, since of overt wrongdoing there was none, what about our truly deplorable lack of sympathy for that instinct of the North (against letting their brethren go) which was undoubtedly magnificent, and that resolution in an uphill struggle which was as heroic as ever the resistance of the South? Ought our fathers to have known that this was at bottom a crusade against slavery? Lincoln's First Inaugural did not tell us so; Seward actually instructed his Minister abroad to tell Europe the contrary' General McClellan, when he com

times during the first half of the war he entertained the foolish idea of mediation; and Palmerston himself had to tell him that this could not be till the North was prepared to welcome it. There can, however, be no doubt that in this he was actuated by no hostility to the North, but at worst by an uncalled for solicitude to stop, if he could, the flow of American blood. For the errors, though unquestionable, which so originated, his countrymen are not going to be ashamed.

Something comparable may be taking place to-day. The British Empire in the very act of making further strides in the path of peace, freedom, and justice, is to some extent exposed in America to misunderstanding, and ex.posed to calumny not less unworthy than that which associated the North with Fugitive-Slave Laws and the traffic in hippopotamus-hide whips. It would not be well that we should reciprocate with exaggerated, or limited, or mean views of what takes place in the United States; a commonwealth as singular and as complex even as this, to some Americans, unintelligible England, and by no means less full than our own of people whose outlook on the world is generous and lofty.

knew so well, now wrapped in the ultimate garment of all mortality. As for the clothing of the hereafter, I find it hard to accept the revelation of Raymond that the forms of the departed are clothed in the emanations of defunct earthly suitings; I prefer to imagine the disembodied freed from fleshly fetters, and not bound in their higher state to the daily adjustment of spiritual braces and celestial suspenders.

The physical bliss to be found in this existence, of nude reveling on a strand lapped by summer waves, fanned by a zephyr and warmed by a bland sun, is surely a premonition of a more perfect state in a less constricted life. Be that as it may, it is with the survivors that we are here concerned. If there was any joy among those old clothes at their disentombment by a familiar hand, the joy of their owners at this resurrection, as they consigned their khaki without unction to the grave, was at least as great. Not only was there affectionate recognition of familiar things all but forgotten, not only was there promise of ease after stiffness, and variety after monotony, but there was assurance of wealth varying, it is true, with the richness of the half-remembered hoard, but wealth real and tangible, a definite and ridiculously enhanced value dwelling in every single article.

Happy indeed was the man who had been extravagant before the war, who counted his shirts by the dozen, who had full measure of socks pressed down and running over, and numbered to every coat two pairs of trousers. If he had been exposed to reproach in earlier days for self-indulgence and vanity, he now proves to have been a wise investor whose investments had appreciated at least one hundred per cent. His many suits, his cupboard full of boots and shoes, his store of ties, were now so much fine gold, promising him