19 A nobility, boastful of its blood, none the less because it bears the bar sinister, a commercial Commons that carries its conscience in its hand, but its hand always in the pocket, graduating goodness by the scale of the counting-house, and regulating right by the balances of the ledger, will have none but marketable virtues; and a whole people, from top to bottom, with its manliness fettered by the taught reverence for mere rank: this was the nation shop-keeping, and aristocratic, too, that turned away from us and listened with a grim smile to the golden promises of the patrician South. For we were England’s rivals in shop-keeping—this was the obvious offence. The backflow of our democracy across the Atlantic had begun to undermine portions of her class prerogative, and this was an added grudge. Perhaps the old pique of being worsted in two wars may have been a third, and the three combined were motive enough for an effort to cripple and disjoin the obnoxious Republic. True, therefore, to her instincts of profit, prejudice and pride, yet untrue utterly to her traditions of philanthropy and moral policy, England had well-nigh committed herself to the Southern alliance for better or worse. But in good season she discovered that the rebel cause was tottering, and her politic conscientiousness receiving this new light, she began to revise
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