204 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 



English society a conviction that the democracy 

 of the South was much less pronounced and 

 aggressive than that of the North that the 

 Southerner was more likely than the North 

 erner, on the average, to conform to the stand 

 ards of the &quot;gentleman/ 5 both in his social and 

 his political ideas and actions. Of the two 

 republics, therefore, into which the United States 

 was henceforth to be divided, the Southern was 

 to be the more amenable to British influence. 

 Moreover, the policy of the South in respect to 

 commerce was sure to be more in accord with 

 the liberal views of Great Britain. Free trade 

 was the manifest preference and the obvious 

 interest of the South, while the recent recur 

 rence of the North to protection, in the Morrill 

 tariff of 1 86 1, revealed a menace to the pros 

 perity of British manufactures. 



The Achilles heel of the Southern case before 

 British opinion was slavery. Hostility to this 

 institution was immovably fixed in the feelings 

 of all classes of the people. Among the aris 

 tocracy, intellectual and social, there was appre 

 ciation of the hard problem of the Southern 

 whites in dealing with the great mass of blacks 

 on their hands, and there was corresponding 

 toleration of the institution as a transitory 



