Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 39.djvu/166

the industrial and political conditions which existed in England at that time, and the different factors which stood for and against the Confederacy. He marshals all the "two arrays."

"In aid of the defiant, slaveholding Confederacy came, first, the great British and Continental, commercial, financial and other cotton spinning interests, with other far reaching political influence; next the supporting textile operatives, not only of Lancashire, but wherever throughout other countries cotton was woven into cloth—they numbered millions; third, the entire governing classes, as they then were, of Great Britain, including the great landed interest. These last also were voiced, and most persistently, as well as powerfully voiced by the London Times, known as 'The Thunderer,' at the acme of its great and remarkable career. Finally, the French Emperor, for Napoleon III, now at the height of his prestige, for reasons of State, was disposed to put forth on behalf of the Confederacy, all the influence which he could exert. A powerful combination, it was one in a worldly and political sense, well nigh irresistible.

"Opposed to it was an array, so apparently meagre as to be almost pitiable; and if the alliance of forces I have just described recalled Homer, that set over against it was not less suggestive biblically——it was David again confronting Goliath. Strange, well nigh inconceivable when now asserted in the full light of the event, that opposing array consisted of John Bright, the tribune in England of political and industrial Democracy, and behind him 'a little bit of a woman,' as she at that time described herself, 'just as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff,' holding in her hand a book: but the woman was Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the book was entitled 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' or 'Life Among the Lowly.'"

A book which he declares "exercised a more immediate, considerable and dramatic world influence than any other book ever printed. * * * Uncle Tom hit the world, so to speak, between wind and water. * * * This was not only so in America, but throughout Europe. Generally, mankind was asserting or ready to assert man's claim for recognition as man. The