Beecher returned home to find himself the hero of the hour. In Plymouth Church, on Sunday morning, the audience stood for five minutes, and with their tears and silence told him of their gratitude and love. From that hour Stanton asked for his friendship, and was weekly and even daily in correspondence. He promised Beecher that immediately upon the receipt of any news from the battle-field he would send him a telegram. Indeed, the first news that the country had from Stanton of one of the great victories came to Beecher's pulpit and was read over his desk. Other great men, the President, secretaries, the generals, the statesmen, editors, lecturers, preachers, did their part, but high among co-workers ranks Henry Ward Beecher. God gave him a great task, and armed him for the battle. He loved the poor, he broke the shackles from the slave, he discovered to the world the love of God, and dying he flung his helmet into the thick of the enemy. It is for us and our children to fight our way forward to that helmet, and fling our own at last into some new fight for the emancipation of the mind and heart of earth's troubled millions. It must be confessed that the aristocracy of England and her upper middle class, in the main, still sympathized with the South, while the English cabinet tried to maintain neutrality. Four-fifths of the House of Lords were "no well-wishers of anything American, and most of the House of Commons voted in sympathy with the South." But the attitude of the "classes" of England was only the reflection of her scholars. Carlyle, whose early books had no sale in England, and who wrote Emerson that he had received his first money to keep him from starvation from Boston and New York, "when not a penny had been realized in England," had no sympathy with liberty and the North. As soon as his own physical wants were supplied by the American check which Emerson sent him, Carlyle began to call the war "a smoky chimney that had taken fire." "No war ever waged in my time was to me more profoundly foolish looking." (Slovenly English, contradictory thinking, and poor morals!) "Neutral I am to a degree." Then Carlyle tried to sum up his view of the situation: "Now speaks the Northern Peter to the Southern Paul: 'Paul, you unaccountable scoundrel! I find you hire your servants for life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going straight to hell.' Paul: 'Good words, Peter; the risk is my own. Hire you your servants by the month or day, and go straight to heaven. Leave me to my own method.' Peter: 'No, I won't. I will beat your brains out.' And he's trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot quite manage it." No one knew better than Carlyle that there is a world diameter between the South hiring a man for life, and by force holding him in slavery. But Carlyle for three years poured out such vapid humbug, cant and hypocrisy as this, and never once was sound in his thinking or fair in his view-point during the entire war.