one distinguished writer is to be believed, this great British interest in the book was due more to English antipathy to America than to antipathy to slavery[27]. This writer was Nassau W. Senior, who, in 1857, published a reprint of his article on "American Slavery" in the 206th number of the _Edinburgh Review_, reintroducing in his book extreme language denunciatory of slavery that had been cut out by the editor of the _Review_[28]. Senior had been stirred to write by the brutal attack upon Charles Sumner in the United States Senate after his speech of May 19-20, 1856, evidence, again, that each incident of the slavery quarrel in America excited British attention. Senior, like Thomas Gladstone, painted the North as all anti-slavery, the South as all pro-slavery. Similar impressions of British understanding (or misunderstanding) are received from the citations of the British provincial press, so favoured by Garrison in his _Liberator_[29]. Yet for intellectual Britain, at least--that Britain which was vocal and whose opinion can be ascertained in spite of this constant interest in American slavery, there was generally a fixed belief that slavery in the United States was so firmly established that it could not be overthrown. Of what use, then, the further expenditure of British sympathy or effort in a lost cause? Senior himself, at the conclusion of his fierce attack on the Southern States, expressed the pessimism of British abolitionists. He wrote, "We do not venture to hope that we, or our sons, or our grandsons, will see American slavery extirpated, or even materially mitigated[30]." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: State Department, Eng., Vol. LXXIX, No. 135, March 27, 1862.] [Footnote 2: Walpole, _Russell_, Vol. II, p. 367.] [Footnote 3: _Life of Lady John Russell_, p. 197.] [Footnote 4: There was a revival of this fear at the end of the American Civil War. This will be commented on later.] [Footnote 5: This was the position of President and Congress: yet the United States had not acknowledged the right of an American citizen to expatriate himself.] [Footnote 6: Between 1797 and 1801, of the sailors taken from American ships, 102 were retained, 1,042 were discharged, and 805 were held for further proof. (Updyke, _The Diplomacy of the War of 1812_, p. 21.)] [Footnote 7: The people of the British North American Provinces regarded the war as an attempt made by America, taking advantage of the European wars, at forcible annexation. In result the fervour of the United Empire Loyalists was renewed, especially in Upper Canada. Thus the same two