still felt; and I should say that afterwards, between the repulse of McClellan and Pope and the Battle of Gettysburg, most of the adherents of the North were consciously "hoping against hope," and, especially at the time of the defeat at Chancellorsville and the Northern invasion by Lee in 1863, were almost ready to confess the case desperate.[A] Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Port Hudson altered the face of affairs, and revived a confidence which gradually strengthened almost into a conviction, such as not all the vast difficulties which afterwards beset Grant in his advance towards Richmond, nor all the nonsense of the Times and other Southern journals about "Johnston continuing to draw Sherman from his base," or Hood cutting him off from his communications, and compelling him to retreat by that most singular of retreating processes, the triumphal march through Georgia from end to end, could ever avail substantially to becloud. Soon after the victory at Gettysburg, those who were not blinded by their wishes or preconceptions saw ground for thinking that the South had made its greatest efforts, and failed,--the North sustained its worst rebuffs, and surmounted them. 2d. The party which believed in the right of the North, but which doubted or disbelieved its sincerity, especially on the question of Slavery, or its eventual success, or both, was of necessity very large,--including, as it did, in a general way, all the Northern partisans whose strength and fulness of conviction were not great enough to enroll them in my first division. It is extremely difficult to form an opinion, or even a guess, on the question of relative numbers; but I have always fancied, that, could the whole nation have been polled on the subject, the number of Northern well-wishers would have been found sensibly to exceed that of the Southern. Generally, men of very grave, reflective, and unprejudiced minds, students in the philosophy of society and history, men known for their lofty ideal of liberty or of culture, appeared to be on the side of the North; and the calm, unfaltering attitude, free from petulance and invective, of those operative classes in Lancashire, whom the war ruined for a while, has often been pointed to as showing that the more informed and intelligent workingmen were also for the North. They endured a great calamity without murmuring, because they thought the cause just which had entailed that calamity upon them. Assuming this to be correct, as I believe it to be, the question remains, What was the opinion (or perhaps one should rather say the sentiment) of the class below this,--the great numerical bulk of the population, who would take sides according as their sympathies, imaginations, prejudices, or traditional conceptions of the right might be roused, irrespectively in the main of reasoning as to any antecedents or consequences? I incline to suppose that the most powerful impulsion to the feelings of this class must have been that