The event has proved that the chances of success were really very much on the side of the North. The superiority in material resources, and certain solid and undeniable successes obtained at and early stage of the war, such as the capture of New Orleans, were known to be on the same side. Slighter grounds would in most cases have sufficed to persuade minds predisposed by sympathy that this side would win; yet the Southern advocates shuffled and played the cards well enough to induce an opposite conclusion in numerous instances. And no doubt many who began by simply believing that the South would succeed went on to think that the North deserved to lose,--partly because, upon such an assumption, the personal superiority must have been very largely with the South, and partly because a combatant who has no fair chance of winning ought to give in, and not persist in shedding blood in vain. If a big man fights a little one, and turns out upon experiment to have next to no chance of beating him, one soon gets angry with the big one for "pegging away," even though one may at first have perceived him to be in the right. Such seemed to many English observers to be the condition of the case in America. They were mistaken, but excusable; but for the error in their premise, their deduction would have been correct, or at least not irrational. 7th. The party which covertly or avowedly, justified slavery was incomparably larger than any Englishman would have dreamed of a week before the secession took place. Till then, I doubt whether any writer of credit, except one, had ventured deliberately to affirm that American slavery is, under limitations, an allowable and advantageous thing. That exception is assuredly a most illustrious one, perhaps the strongest head and stoutest heart in the British dominions, and our living writer of the most exalted and durable fame,--Thomas Carlyle. His "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question," published some years ago, ruffled and outraged the anti-slavery mind, which then, and for some while before and since, might fairly be termed the mind of all England. That Discourse staggered some readers, and roused others,--roused them to contemplate the whole question from a more fundamental and actual, a less traditional and prejudged point of view, than had been in vogue since our own abolition movement gained the ascendency. It became apparent to various thinkers that the humanitarian view of the question was not its be-all and end-all; that some facts and considerations _per contra_ had to be taken into account; and that what one train of thought and feeling denounced as a mere self-condemned wrong might, according to another, be even regarded as a higher right. Still, this "new light" upon slavery was received more or less fully by only a very few minds, as compared with the general mass of British conviction,--a few thorough-going believers in Carlyle, a few hardy and open-minded