228 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 



the rule; but Bright and Cobden, leading the 

 lower middle and working classes, with Glad 

 stone and Palmerston speaking for the upper 

 middle class and the titled aristocracy, were the 

 typical exponents of the respective sympathies. 

 When the Emancipation Proclamation seemed 

 to announce the extinction of slavery as the 

 purpose of the North, a perceptible gain in favor 

 for that section followed, and those humani 

 tarians who had committed themselves to the 

 South were called upon to revise or explain 

 their position. Their task was no harder than 

 that of the Quaker, John Bright, who in 1854 

 was full of scorn for the idea that there could be 

 any connection between the slaughter of thou 

 sands and the cause of freedom, but ten years 

 later found the slaughter of hundreds of thou 

 sands abundantly justified by the liberation of 

 the blacks. 1 



As a matter of fact, a fundamental influence 

 in fixing the sympathies of Britons was the 

 more or less unconscious perception of a rela 

 tion between the American problem and their 

 own. The liberalizing and democratizing spirit 

 was steadily disintegrating both the old polit 

 ical parties. Those who welcomed the work of 



1 Trevelyan, Life of John Bright, 226, 3 18. 



