THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 227 



anced Americans the qualifications with which 

 the claims of the naturalized citizens were to 

 be taken were obvious; yet the incessant de 

 nunciation of Great Britain by the Irish and 

 their friends inevitably strengthened the cur 

 rent of ill feeling that derived its portentous 

 volume from other sources. 



While American feeling and policy were tak 

 ing the forms that have been noticed, what were 

 the effects in Great Britain of the triumph of the 

 North? Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a mem 

 ber of the Palmerston cabinet, recorded in the 

 midst of the tumult the opinion that the civil 

 war in the United States was a phenomenon of 

 world-wide significance, not a mere local fray. 

 The soundness of the judgment has been con 

 tinuously confirmed as the decades have passed 

 along, but it was discernible very early in the 

 effect of the conflict on the trend of British home 

 politics. The division of sympathy in England 

 as between the two contending sections followed 

 pretty closely the cleavage between the social 

 classes whose antagonism was crossing and con 

 fusing the old party alignment. The Duke of 

 Argyll, sustaining the North, and Laird and 

 Roebuck, sustaining the South, were indeed 

 examples of deviation that served to emphasize 



