20 some of her equivocal admissions and initiated a sort of tardy justice to the United States. Her leading newspapers spoke out a half-way reclaimer of their former arguments—spoke more absolutely for complete neutrality, and always capped their logic with the potent suggestion of self-interest, that their committal to the Southern cause might furnish precedents which would be found by-and- bye to be not wrong, not unlawful, not unfriendly, but simply reactionary and troublesome. This turned the scale of conscience and of favoritism, and the South saw itself crippled of its best hope. But one other hope was left. There was, a nation, we can hardly call it, and still less can wTe call it a people in any political sense of that word—but there was another power interested, no less than England, in favor of cotton and against democracy. This power invested in one despotic person, keen, ambitious, unscrupulous, whose antecedents make up a biography that in some other century than the nineteenth would have suited a Borgia or a Cataline—this power, in its own left-handed way, gave the rebellion hope. But it was a short-lived consolation. The bow being strung too far, the forbearance of the French people having run to the length of its tether—the exchequer giving signs of collapse—the jealousy of the European powers being stirred, and the grand demonstration stood still where it was. The rebel hopes of friends
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