The pupil and master became great friends. Fawcett appreciated the gentle charm of the singular delicacy of feeling which he found under Mill’s austere and aloof nature. At the unveiling in 1878 of Mill’s statue, Fawcett said that Mill possessed qualities supposed to be the peculiar privileges of women, a gentleness and tenderness such as no woman could exceed. He revered his teacher so profoundly that it was sometimes thought that he was less generous in listening to the side of their common opponents. In later years Professor Sidgwick, who ventured to find some flaws in the crystal, met with scant sympathy from Fawcett. Walking with a friend in Cambridge, Fawcett’s attention was called to the nearness of Professor Sidgwick, apparently deep in conversation. ‘Oh yes,’ said he, ‘there goes Sidgwick, carping on Mill.’ [Sidenote: American Civil War.] While Fawcett was busying himself with the theory of economics in the quiet courts of Cambridge, its practice had given rise to a great conflagration in the Western Continent. The American Civil War raised many problems outside the country where it raged. England was considering where her sympathies lay. The Palmerstonian instinct to support a small state revolting against the possibly arbitrary insistence of a greater power gave one impulse in favour of the South; the grudging desire to see a large country split up gave another in the same direction. These were the feelings of the aristocracy and the press. But the Radicals and the common people had quite other thoughts. To them the great country in the West was the home and hope of freedom, and that [Sidenote: Lancashire Work People and Freedom.] it should strive to wipe itself free of the stain of slavery won the full sympathy of the freedom-loving people in the mother country. The working people of Lancashire stood by and starved that they might help America to be free. In 1863 Leslie Stephen crossed the Atlantic. His letters to his mother were at his request all forwarded to Fawcett, who helped his friend by getting him letters of introduction. Stephen writes, ‘The letter which Fawcett got me from Bright to Seward proved very useful. It brought Seward down completely. Bright’s name is (as Fawcett may tell him) a complete tower of strength in these parts. They all talked of him with extraordinary admiration.’ And again, ‘I also hear that old fox, Fawcett, with his customary low cunning, speaks complimentarily of my letters and suggests my writing a book on America.’ [Sidenote: Fawcett for Lincoln and the Union.] Fawcett from the first was a strong Federalist, and both in public and in private spoke for the North. At Cambridge he was one of a small minority, and his rooms were the scene of many a battle for Lincoln and the Union. [Illustration: HENRY FAWCETT AT CAMBRIDGE, 1863 From a contemporary painting in Trinity Hall The other figures from left to right are Fawcett’s guide, Professor Geldart and Leslie Stephen]