of the North; and declared that the interests of America and of the world would be best served by the independence of the South.  The effect of a full year’s penetration in England of Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation is shown in the necessity felt by the framers of this constitution to meet that issue.  This required delicate handling and was destined to cause some heart-burnings.  The concluding section of the constitution read: 

“The Association will also devote itself to the cultivation of kindly feelings between the people of Great Britain and of the Confederate States; and it will, in particular, steadily but kindly represent to the Southern States, that recognition by Europe must necessarily lead to a revision of the system of servile labour, unhappily bequeathed to them by England, in accordance with the spirit of the age, so as to combine the gradual extinction of slavery with the preservation of property, the maintenance of the civil polity, and the true civilization of the negro race[1144].”

The Association was unquestionably armed with distinguished guns of heavy calibre in its Committee and officers, and its membership fee (one guinea annually) was large enough to attract the elite, but it remained to be seen whether all this equipment would be sent into action.  As yet the vigour of the movement was centred at Manchester and even there a curious situation soon arose.  Spence in various speeches, was declaring that the “Petition to Parliament” movement was spreading rapidly. 30,000 at Ashton, he said, had agreed to memoralize the Government.  But on January 30, 1864, Mason Jones, a pro-Northern speaker in the Free Trade Hall at Manchester, asked why Southern public meetings had come to a halt.  “The Southerners,” he declared, “had taken the Free Trade Hall in the outset with that intention and they were obliged to pay the rent of the room, though they did not use it.  They knew that their resolutions would be outvoted and that amendments would pass against them[1145].”  There must have been truth in the taunt for while The Index in nearly every issue throughout the middle of 1864 reports great activity there, it does not give any account of a public meeting.  The reports were of many applications for membership “from all quarters, from persons of rank and gentlemen of standing in their respective counties[1146].”

Just here lay the weakness of the Southern Independence Association programme.  It did appeal to “persons of rank and gentlemen of standing,” but by the very fact of the flocking to it of these classes it precluded appeal to Radical and working-class England—­already largely committed to the cause of the North.  Goldwin Smith, in his “Letter to a Whig Member of the Southern Independence Association,” made the point very clear[1147].  In this pamphlet, probably the strongest presentation of the Northern side and the most severe castigation of Southern sympathizers