institutions, united with an established opinion that slavery was permanently fixed in the United States to reinforce governmental indifference, sometimes even hostility, to America.  The British public, also, was largely hopeless of any change in the institution of slavery, and its own active humanitarian interest was waning, though still dormant—­not dead.  Yet the two nations, to a degree not true of any other two world-powers, were of the same race, had similar basic laws, read the same books, and were held in close touch at many points by the steady flow of British emigration to the United States.

When, after the election of Lincoln to the Presidency, in November, 1860, the storm-clouds of civil strife rapidly gathered, the situation took both British Government and people by surprise.  There was not any clear understanding either of American political conditions, or of the intensity of feeling now aroused over the question of the extension of slave territory.  The most recent descriptions of America had agreed in assertion that at some future time there would take place, in all probability, a dissolution of the Union, on lines of diverging economic interests, but also stated that there was nothing in the American situation to indicate immediate progress in this direction.  Grattan, a long-time resident in America as British Consul at Boston, wrote: 

“The day must no doubt come when clashing objects will break the ties of common interest which now preserve the Union.  But no man may foretell the period of dissolution....  The many restraining causes are out of sight of foreign observation.  The Lilliputian threads binding the man mountain are invisible; and it seems wondrous that each limb does not act for itself independently of its fellows.  A closer examination shows the nature of the network which keeps the members of this association so tightly bound.  Any attempt to untangle the ties, more firmly fastens them.  When any one State talks of separation, the others become spontaneously knotted together.  When a section blusters about its particular rights, the rest feel each of theirs to be common to all.  If a foreign nation hint at hostility, the whole Union becomes in reality united.  And thus in every contingency from which there can be danger, there is also found the element of safety.”  Yet, he added, “All attempts to strengthen this federal government at the expense of the States’ governments must be futile....  The federal government exists on sufferance only.  Any State may at any time constitutionally withdraw from the Union, and thus virtually dissolve it[32].”

Even more emphatically, though with less authority, wrote one Charles Mackay, styled by the American press as a “distinguished British poet,” who made the usual rapid tour of the principal cities of America in 1857-58, and as rapidly penned his impressions: