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James Ford Rhodes (1848–1927). History of the Civil War, 1861–1865. 1917.

Page 277

  according to the Spectator, represented “the higher intelligence of England,” and their ground of reasoning revealed clearly the bond of sympathy between the two landed aristocracies separated by the sea. The Southern lords, by their system of labor, were relieved from the minute cares of money-making, were enabled to maintain an open and generous hospitality, and were afforded leisure for devotion to society and politics, thus obtaining a kind of community of life, tastes and aims with the English noblemen, who, in turn, had begun by looking kindly upon the Southern Confederacy, wishing for its success, and ended with taking up cudgels for negro slavery.  24   The sympathies of many of the eminent literary men were withheld from the North. Grote, who loved democracy in Greece and could palliate its excesses in Athens, criticised with acrimony the Northern people, because they insisted that England had violated her declared neutrality and because their protests were not couched in courteous and polished language. Carlyle, who had received the first money for his “French Revolution” from Boston, when “not a penny had been realized in England,” and who was profoundly thankful for all that this implied, as well as for the needed money, had now no fellow-feeling with the North. “No war ever raging in my time,” he said, “was to me more profoundly foolish looking. Neutral I am to a degree: I for one.” Again he spoke of it as “a smoky chimney which had taken fire,” and when asked to publish something in regard to the conflict, he wrote his Ilias Americana in nuce. “Peter of the North (to Paul of the South): Paul, you unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going straight to hell, you—  25   Paul: Good Words, Peter. The risk is my own. I am