We have here the history of the beginning of the end, but who can tell how the pages will be written which are yet to be filled before the inevitable separation is accomplished?
Are scenes like those which we a short time since described from Dahomey yet to interpose, and is the reign of the last PRESIDENT to go out amid horrible massacres of white women and children, to be followed by the extermination of the black race in the South?
Is LINCOLN yet a name not known to us as it will be known to posterity, and is it ultimately to be classed among that catalogue of monsters, the wholesale assassins and butchers of their kind?
"...

We will attempt at present to predict nothing as to what the consequence of Mr.Lincoln's new policy may be, except that it certainly will not have the effect of restoring the Union.

It will not deprive Mr.Lincoln of the distinctive affix which he will share with many, for the most part foolish and incompetent, Kings and Emperors, Caliphs and Doges, that of being LINCOLN--'the Last.'" The _Times_ led the way; other papers followed on.

The _Liverpool Post_ thought a slave rising inevitable[927], as did also nearly every paper acknowledging anti-Northern sentiments, or professedly neutral, while even pro-Northern journals at first feared the same results[928].
Another striking phrase, "Brutum Fulmen," ran through many editorials.
The _Edinburgh Review_ talked of Lincoln's "cry of despair[929]," which was little different from Seward's feared "last shriek." _Blackwood's_ thought the proclamation "monstrous, reckless, devilish." It "justifies the South in raising the black flag, and proclaiming a war without quarter[930]." But there is no need to expand the citation of the well-nigh universal British press pouring out of the wrath of heaven upon Lincoln, and his emancipation proclamation[931].
Even though there can be no doubt that the bulk of England at first expected servile war to follow the proclamation it is apparent that here and there a part of this British wrath was due to a fear that, in spite of denials of such influence, the proclamation was intended to arouse public opinion against projects of intervention and _might so arouse it_.

The New York correspondent of the _Times_ wrote that it was "promulgated evidently as a sop to keep England and France quiet[932]," and on October 9, an editorial asserted that Lincoln had "a very important object.