judgment which he had over and over again pronounced in the whole series of these political papers, for he never lost sight of the fundamental fact that freedom resides in the spirit of man and is but recorded in his institutions. Once more he wrote a prose paper for the _Atlantic_, moved by the attitude in England, for with others of his kind Lowell took grievously to heart the comments of the English press and the actions of the British government. In this paper, published December, 1861, entitled “Self-Possession _vs._ Prepossession,” he finds unmistakable symptoms of reaction in England, since 1848, against liberalism in politics, and tries the criticism of the United States government in which the press indulged by the action of England toward Ireland and India; and finally he points out the restrictions imposed on any constitutional government by the very conditions of its existence, forbidding it to act in advance of the convictions of its people. This he does to defend the administration against the charge that it is indifferent to the question of emancipation. He is impatient indeed of the extreme caution of Mr. Lincoln and his associates, but he is nevertheless of the opinion that the time has not yet come for turning the war into a crusade. It is interesting to mark how uppermost in Lowell’s mind is the cause of national unity. Time was when he drew near to the position taken by some of his anti-slavery associates that disunion was preferable to complicity with slavery; but as the conflict between the two opposing forces deepened, he took more and more steadily the larger view, and his democratic principles became bound up with the unity of the nation, and at last with the supremacy of law as represented by the national cause.