Historians of the British response to the American Civil War must be grateful to Dr D. P. Crook for reminding them of the danger of searching too keenly for partisan alignments. It is interesting to find that the ‘little journals’, with their relative freedom from external pressures, offered an appraisal of the secession crisis and the outbreak of war that was reasonably objective. It might, however, be useful to point out that similar views were to be found in the editorial columns of the provincial press, rising to the zenith of its influence in English political life and representing opinion whose intelligence may be debatable, but whose significance was certainly no less than that of the eight journals examined by Dr Crook and whose influence on government policy was perhaps stronger.