But though danger of intervention was thus for the time averted, and the relations between the British Government and our own remained nominally friendly, so far as moral influence and bitterness of feeling could go the Republic had no more determined enemies in the cotton States than in the heart of England. The aristocratic classes rejoiced at anything that threatened to destroy democratic government or make its stability doubtful. They confidently expected to see our country fall into a state of anarchy like that experienced so often by the Spanish-American republics, and were willing to do everything they safely could do to bring it about. The foremost English journals had been predicting such a disaster ever since the beginning of the century, had announced it as in progress when a British force burned Washington in 1814, and now were surer of it than ever. Almost our only friends of the London press were the _Daily News_ and _Weekly Spectator_. The commercial classes, in a country that had fought so many commercial wars, were of course delighted at the crippling of a commercial rival whom they had so long hated and feared, no matter what it might cost in the shedding of blood and the destruction of social order. Among the working classes, though they suffered heavily when the supply of cotton was diminished, we had many firm and devoted friends, who saw and felt, however imperfectly, that the cause of free labor was their own cause, no matter on which side of the Atlantic the battlefield might lie. To those who had for years endured the taunts of Englishmen who pointed to American slavery and its tolerance in the American Constitution, while they boasted that no slave could breathe on British soil, it was a strange sight, when our country was at war over the question, to see almost everything that had power {66} and influence in England arrayed on the side of the slaveholders. A few famous Englishmen--notably John Bright and Goldwin Smith--were true to the cause of liberty, and did much to instruct the laboring classes as to the real nature and significance of the conflict. Henry Ward Beecher, then at the height of his powers, went to England and addressed large audiences, enlightening them as to the real nature of American affairs, concerning which most of them were grossly ignorant, and produced an effect that was probably never surpassed by any orator. The Canadians, with the usual narrowness of provincials, blind to their own ultimate interests, were in the main more bitterly hostile than the mother country.