In our house the London Punch was stopped, because of its hostile ridicule.

I grew to boyhood hearing from my elders how England had for years taunted us with our tolerance of slavery while we boasted of being the Land of the Free--and then, when we arose to abolish slavery, how she "jack-knived" and gave aid and comfort to the slave power when it had its fingers upon our throat.

Many of that generation of my elders never wholly got over the rage and the wound.

They hated all England for the sake of less than half England.
They counted their enemies but never their friends.

There's nothing unnatural about this, nothing rare.