“In that reconstruction of political philosophy which the American calamities are likely to inaugurate, the value of the popular element will be reduced to its due proportions....  The true guarantee of freedom will be looked for more in the equilibrium of classes than in the equality of individuals....  We may hope, at last, that the delusive confusion between freedom and democracy is finally banished from the minds of Englishmen[1342].”

“The real secret,” wrote Motley, “of the exultation which manifests itself in the Times and other organs over our troubles and disasters, is their hatred, not to America, so much as to democracy in England[1343].”  It was scarcely a secret in the columns of the journals already quoted.  But no similar interpretation had as yet appeared in the Times and Motley’s implication was justified for it and other leading daily newspapers.  The Reviews and Weeklies were for the moment leading the attack—­possibly one reason for the slowness in reply of Bright and his followers.  Not all Reviews joined in the usual analysis.  The Edinburgh at first saw in slavery the sole cause of the American dispute[1344], then attributed it to the inevitable failure in power of a federal system of government, not mentioning democracy as in question[1345]. Blackwood’s repeatedly pushed home its argument: 

“Independent of motives of humanity, we are glad that the end of the Union seems more likely to be ridiculous than terrible....  But for our own benefit and the instruction of the world we wish to see the faults, so specious and so fatal, of their political system exposed, in the most effective way....  And the venerable Lincoln, the respectable Seward, the raving editors, the gibbering mob, and the swift-footed warriors of Bull’s Run, are no malicious tricks of fortune played off on an unwary nation, but are all of them the legitimate offspring of the great Republic ... dandled and nursed—­one might say coddled—­by Fortune, the spoiled child Democracy, after playing strange pranks before high heaven, and figuring in odd and unexpected disguises, dies as sheerly from lack of vitality as the oldest of worn-out despotisms....  In the hope that this contest may end in the extinction of mob rule, we become reconciled to the much slighter amount of suffering that war inflicts on America[1346].”

Equally outspoken were a few public men who early espoused the cause of the South.  Beresford Hope, before a “distinguished audience” used language insulting to the North, fawning upon the South and picturing the latter as wholly admirable for its aristocratic tendencies.  For this he was sharply taken to task by the Spectator[1347].  More sedately the Earl of Shrewsbury proclaimed, “I see in America the trial of Democracy and its failure.  I believe that the dissolution of the Union is inevitable, and that men now before me will live to see an aristocracy