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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: Lancashire cotton-spinners were out of work, or working half time. Their
starvation and that of their wives and children could be stemmed by
charity alone. I have talked with people who saw those thousands in their
suffering. Yet those thousands bore it. They somehow looked through
Lincoln's express disavowal of any intention to interfere with slavery,
and saw that at bottom our war was indeed against slavery, that slavery
was behind the Southern camouflage about independence, and behind the
Northern slogan about preserving the Union. They saw and they stuck.
"Rarely," writes Charles Francis Adams, "in the history of mankind, has
there been a more creditable exhibition of human sympathy." France was
likewise damaged by our blockade; and Napoleon III would have liked to
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