Yet Adams was also forwarding addresses and speeches harping on American democracy.

A meeting at Edinburgh, February 19, found place, in its emancipation aspect in the United States documents[1365], but the burden of that meeting, democracy, did not.

It was there proclaimed that the British press misrepresented conditions in America, "because the future of free political institutions, as sketched in the American Declaration of Independence and in the State Constitutions of the Northern States, would be a standing argument against the expansion of the franchise and the enjoyment of just political rights among us, as well as a convenient argument in favour of the continued domination of our aristocratic parties[1366]." The tide of democratic feeling was rising rapidly in England.

On March 26, Adams wrote to Seward of a recent debate in Parliament that that body was much more judicious in expressions on America than it had been before 1862.

"It will not escape your observation that the question is now felt to be taking a shape which was scarcely anticipated by the managers [of the _Times_] when they first undertook to guide the British mind to the overthrow of free institutions in America[1367]." On the evening of the day on which this was written there occurred the greatest, most outspoken, and most denunciatory to the aristocracy, of the meetings held to support the cause of the North.