nor need we affect particularly to lament the exhibition of the weak point of a Constitution ...

the disruption of which leaves entirely untouched the laws and usages which America owes to England, and which have contributed so powerfully to her prosperity...." "With a rival Government on the frontier ...

with great principles to be not vapoured about but put to the proof we should probably see the natural aristocracy rise from the dead level of the Republic, raising the national character with its own elevation[1336]." In the same month the _Quarterly_, always more calm, logical and convincing than _Blackwood's_, published "Democracy on its Trial[1337]." "The example of America kept alive, as it had created, the party of progress"; now "it has sunk from the decrepitude of premature old age." If England, after such an example, permits herself to be led into democracy she "will have perished by that wilful infatuation which no warning can dispel." Adams had complained that few British friends of progress identified the cause of the North with their own, but this was true of Americans also.
The _Atlantic Monthly_ for July 1861, discussed British attitude wholly in terms of cotton supply.

But soon there appeared in the British press so many preachments on the "lesson" of America that the aristocratic effort to gain an advantage at home became apparent to all[1338].

The _Economist_ moralized on the "untried" character of American institutions and statesmen, the latter usually as ignorant as the "masses" whom they represented and if more intellectual still more worthy of contempt because of their "voluntary moral degradation" to the level of their constituents[1339].