It authorized an army of 500,000, provided for a loan of $200,000,000, sanctioned the issue of $50,000,000 in Treasury notes and levied new taxes, both direct and by tariffs to meet these expenditures.
In the months preceding the attack on Sumter the fixed determination of the South to secede and the uncertainty of the North had led the British press to believe that the decision rested wholly with the South.

Now the North by its preparations was exhibiting an equally fixed determination to preserve the Union, and while the British press was sceptical of the permanence of this determination, it became, for a short time, until editorial policy was crystallized, more cautious in prophecy.

The _Economist_ on May 4 declared that the responsibility for the "fatal step" rested wholly on Southern leaders because of their passionate desire to extend the shameful institution of which they were so proud, but that the North must inevitably, by mere weight of population and wealth, be the victor, though this could not conceivably result in any real reunion, rather in a conquest requiring permanent military occupation.

Southern leaders were mad: "to rouse by gratuitous insult the mettle of a nation three times as numerous and far more than three times as powerful, to force them by aggressive steps into a struggle in which the sympathy of every free and civilized nation will be with the North, seems like the madness of men whose eyes are blinded and hearts hardened by the evil cause they defend." Two weeks later, the _Economist_, while still maintaining the justice of the Northern cause, though with lessened vigour, appealed to the common sense of the North to refrain from a civil war whose professed object was unattainable.

"Everyone knows and admits that the secession is an accomplished, irrevocable, fact....