Note 161 — Chapter III
Reading edition
F.O., Am., 763, No. 197, Lyons to Russell, received May 26. The full statement is: "To an Englishman, sincerely interested in the welfare of this country, the present state of things is peculiarly painful. Abhorrence of slavery, respect for law, more complete community of race and language, enlist his sympathies on the side of the North. On the other hand, he cannot but reflect that any encouragement to the predominant war feeling in the North cannot but be injurious to both sections of the country. The prosecution of the war can lead only to the exhaustion of the North by an expenditure of life and money on an enterprise in which success and failure would be alike disastrous. It must tend to the utter devastation of the South. It would at all events occasion a suspension of Southern cultivation which would be calamitous even more to England than to the Northern States themselves."