602 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



them are very characteristic at once of his wide tolerance and his 

 marked tendency toward conciliation and compromise. For example, 

 he writes once : 



The time may be nearer than some think, when we shall have all sects en- 

 dowed, which I trust will happen, instead of none being so. But, at all events, 

 I abhor the political disaffection created in Ireland, Scotland, and England by 

 the exclusive privileges of Church of England ascendency. It is really the power 

 which is oppressive here, and not the monarchy, nor the aristocracy. Perhaps I 

 feel it too sensitively as a scientific man, since our Puseyites have excluded phys- 

 ical science from Oxford. They are wise in their generation. The abject defer- 

 ence to authority advocated conscientiously by them can never survive a sound 

 philosophical education. 



He made altogether four voyages to America, always with an in- 

 creasing sympathy for whatever is best in American life. Slavery 

 troubled him much. He saw that the slaves were fairly well treated ; 

 that tbey worked lightly, fed well, enjoyed themselves hugely, and 

 were profoundly careless about their own condition. He thought that, 

 " if emancipated, they would suffer very much more than they would 

 gain," and just at first he was half disposed to palter and parley with 

 the accursed thing. But more thinking brought him back to himself ; 

 and, when the War of Secession came, he was firm as a rock on the 

 right side, when all English society was going steadily wrong. No 

 political movement of his time seems ever to have .interested and 

 excited him so much. 



" If the result of the struggle," he writes to Mr. Ticknor in the 

 very thick of the war, " could be the abolition of slavery by the year 

 1900, it would be worth a beavy debt and many lives, at any rate 

 when one thinks of what most wars are waged for, not but that the 

 Union alone is worth a long fighting for." And the longest letter, I 

 think, in the whole correspondence, is one to his friend Mr. T. Sped- 

 ding, defending his faith in the North against adverse criticism a 

 manly, noble, outspoken letter, which by itself sufficiently stanrps its 

 writer. A few condensed extracts are well worth making : 



j & 



I admit that every people have the right of rebellion or revolution when- 

 ever they are oppressed. . . . But, so far from having any just grounds of 

 rebellion, the South had been dominant to the last in foreign and domestic 

 politics, had always had the lion's share in the choice of Presidents and other 

 civil appointments. ... In short, they rebelled simply because Lincoln's elec- 

 tion showed them that the Republican party were at last determined to resist 

 the extension of slavery into new Territories. ... If such men as Gladstone and 

 Earl Russell had been only six weeks in the United States, they would never 

 have said what they did. . . . Lincoln and his colleagues are not the sort of men 

 that you and I would put into a Cabinet, so far as their conventional manners 

 are concerned ; . . . but, after all, are Lords Palmerston, Clarendon, and some 

 others, men of higher principle than Lincoln, or as high ? I am intimate with 

 men equal to any here in literary attainments and in polish of manners, and of 

 independent fortune, in the United States, whom I used to wish to see in power 



