Better than any American statesman, General Clingman seems to have understood the motives and interests of Great Britain in fomenting the slavery agitation and the estrangement of the sections. Hear him, in his address to the people of the Eighth Congressional District of North Carolina, March 16, 1856: "The United States is the great republic of the earth, and the example of our free institutions was shaking the foundations of the monarchical and aristocratic governments of Europe. This was especially the case as respects the political system of Great Britain, owing to our common language, literature, and extended commercial intercourse. The aristocracy there hold the mass of the people in subjection, and under a condition so oppressive that large numbers of white men of their own race are liable to perish miserably by famine in years of scarcity. A knowledge of the successful working of our institutions was increasing the discontent of the common people, and, fearing the loss of its sway, the aristocracy, which controls the entire power of the government, began a crusade for the abolition of slavery in the United States. They expected, in the first place, by affected sympathy for the negroes here, to divert the minds of the people at home, to some extent, from the consideration of their own sufferings, and to create the impression that other laborers were much worse off than their own. And should they succeed in breaking up our system they would exultingly point to it as an evidence against the durability of free institutions. "With a view, therefore, to effect these objects, more than twenty years ago the British press, and book-makers generally were stimulated to embark in a systematic war against negro slavery in the United States. Abolition lecturers were sent over and money furnished to establish papers and circulate pamphlets to inflame the minds of the citizens of the Northern States. "Looking far ahead, they sought to incorporate their doctrines into the school-books and publications best calculated to influence the minds of the young and ignorant. Their views were most readily received in Massachusetts, where British influence has, for the last half century, been greatest. From this State these doctrines were gradually diffused to a great extent throughout the North." At the time that the British politicians were taking so much interest in the slavery question of America, and deprecating with many crocodile tears our treatment of the negroes they had sold us, the _Edinburgh Review_ of January, 1856, charges the British Government with collecting rents and taxes from its subjects in India by means of the thumb-screw and other tortures as devilish as ingenuity could devise. See _Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman_.