Madison." The Church was
rebel, but the dissenters were mostly with the Union. The
universities were rebel, but the university men who enjoyed most
public confidence -- like Lord Granville, Sir George Cornewall
Lewis, Lord Stanley, Sir George Grey -- took infinite pains to be
neutral for fear of being thought eccentric. To most observers,
as well as to the Times, the Morning Post, and the Standard, a
vast majority of the English people seemed to follow the
professional eccentrics; even the emotional philanthropists took
that direction; Lord Shaftesbury and Carlyle, Fowell Buxton, and
Gladstone, threw their sympathies on the side which they should
naturally have opposed, and did so for no reason except their
eccentricity; but the "canny" Scots and Yorkshiremen were
cautious.
This eccentricity did not mean strength. The proof of it was
the mismanagement of the rebel interests. No doubt the first
cause of this trouble lay in the Richmond Government itself. No
one understood why Jefferson Davis chose Mr. Mason as his agent
for London at the same time that he made so good a choice as Mr.
Slidell for Paris. The Confederacy had plenty of excellent men to
send to London, but few who were less fitted than Mason. Possibly
Mason had a certain amount of common sense, but he seemed to have
nothing else, and in London society he counted merely as one
eccentric more.
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