A dozen years later, on the eve of the war for the Union, Mr. Hughes, who was introducing the book to the English public, wanted Lowell to write an historical introduction. In declining to do this,[76] he gave a brief and clear statement of his political position at the time of writing the “Biglow Papers.” “I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever has against a weak one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery. Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues. Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed and still believe that slavery is the Achilles heel of our polity: that it is a temporary and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I tried my first ‘Biglow Paper’ in a newspaper and found that it had a great run. So I wrote the others from time to time during the year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with ‘What Mr. Robinson thinks’) at one sitting.” The cleverness of the refrain in this last named poem started it on a hilarious career, and it is perhaps only in one of Gilbert’s topical songs that we can match the success of a collocation of words, where the quaintness of turn keeps a barren phrase perennially amusing. It was with an echo of it in his mind no doubt that when he had just done reading the proofs of the entire volume, Lowell snapped his whip in like fashion in a poem for the _Standard_, which he never reprinted, but which is interesting from the diversity shown in the handling of a single theme.