As a concession they are useless; as a confession they are untrue....

Thus the Southerner may retort as we have seen that an Englishman would retort for his country.

He might say the South is proud, and of nothing more proud than this--not that she has slaves, but that she has treated them as slaves never were treated before, that she has used power as no nation ever used it under similar circumstances, and that she has solved mercifully and humanely a most difficult problem which has elsewhere defied solution save in blood.

Or he might use the unspoken reflection of an honest Southerner at hearing much said of 'the foul blot': 'It was indeed a dark and damnable blot that England left us with, and it required all the efforts of Southern Christianity to pale it as it now is[1200].'" In 1862 and to the fall of 1863, _The Index_ had declared that slavery was not an issue in the war; now its defence of the "domestic institution" of the South, repeatedly made in varying forms, was evidence of the great effect in England of Lincoln's emancipation edicts.

_The Index_ could not keep away from the subject.