“The President thinks it desirable that the Government of Great
Britain should consider, before the war closes, what are likely to be
the sentiments of the two nations in regard to each other after that
event shall have occurred.”
We wonder whether it ever occurred to Mr Seward that if the imaginary
injuries of one nation upon another are to be visited with such remote
vindictiveness, it may be probable that very real and deep sufferings
may leave still more indelible rancour behind them; and that there is a
people at this moment not only undergoing treatment at the hands of the
Union which excites the horror of civilised nations, but proving itself
perfectly capable of executing future vengeance.
But in providing for the probability that Great Britain will be
indifferent to the high moral ground which he indicates for giving her
sympathies to the Union, Mr Seward does not trust entirely to threats. A
lower argument, better suited to her defective moral sense, consists in
pointing out that it is the interest of European countries to see the
war terminate as quickly as possible; that it is also the interest of
the Union to terminate the war as quickly as possible: _ergo_, the way
to attain the common object is to unite in procuring it. But he omits to
show why the same argument might not apply with equal force to an
alliance with the South.
All this eloquence and logic has a double object—first, to avert the
recognition of the South, followed by subsequent intervention; and,
secondly, and chiefly, to induce the European Powers to retrace the step
they had taken of acknowledging the South as a belligerent. The original
protest against this step had been on the particular ground that the
Government had taken it more hastily than was needful, and ought to have
awaited the arrival of Mr Adams, charged with the reasons which the
Federal Government might urge in protesting against it. As the measure
was one of neutrality, it was manifestly proper that it should be
adopted without hearing the arguments of one side only. However, the
North considered itself injured, and expressed its sense of injury; but
until we read these papers we had thought that the precipitation of the
measure was the chief ground on which it was complained of. But so far
from that being the case, the measure itself constitutes, down to the
present time, the chief point of dispute. It is not going too far to say
that, had the Federal Government accepted the position of neutrality of
foreign Governments, and conducted its relations with them on that
basis, the greater part of these despatches need never have been
written. Nine-tenths of them are the result of looking at the same facts
from two points of view—of looking at the war, on the one side, as a
conflict between great sections, each possessed of power sufficient to
maintain itself against the other, and to produce consequences highly
important to neutrals; on the other side, as a domestic difficulty
caused by a weak and failing faction, and which should not be noticed by
foreign Powers any more than any other insignificant outbreak. Our
Government saw in it the division of the Republic into portions,
strongly defined by a territorial line, arming themselves for a conflict
in which the balance of right was a subtle question open to opposite
interpretations, but in which, it was evident, the Federal Government
could never be victorious consistently with its own principles. The
magnitude of the quarrel was such as powerfully to affect our own
interests, and to render the probability imminent that the Queen’s
subjects would be involved in the struggle, on the one side or the
other, in such a manner as to compromise themselves, perhaps the
Government. That the nature of the war was rightly estimated, events
have more than sufficiently proved; that it was the first duty of the
Government to protect its own subjects will probably be admitted by most
moralists. But there is one moralist, Mr Seward, who thinks that the
British Government, however bound to protect the interests of its own
subjects, as it might be, he admits, in an inferior degree, is still
more bound to consider the interests of the human race as involved in
the maintenance of the Federal Union,—of the system, be it remembered,
whose inevitable results have been to make a Lincoln the chief
magistrate, and a Seward the chief minister—a system which has for years
been the most corrupt ever known, and the inability of which to produce
any kind of political merit is one of the wonders of the world.
Mr Seward’s view, which he insists that foreign Governments should
adopt, is that they must not admit the existence of any war at all; that
Bull’s Run and Fredericksburg, and all the disasters of M‘Clellan and
Pope, are the work of a small insurrectionary faction; that the
inability of the Federalists to recover authority in the South does not
at all affect the integrity of the Republic; and that the millions of
men whom he so complacently describes as determined to restore the Union
have been called to arms to quell a few “misguided fellow-citizens” who
have taken the “bad resolution” of seceding from its authority. But
neither great defeats, nor vast armaments, nor huge debt, nor impending
dissolution, can divert Mr. Seward from his singular efforts to persuade
foreign Governments, chiefly ours, to adopt his extraordinary fiction as
their rule of action. If mere acquiescence in his view were all that he
demanded, it might be no great matter; but he requires that we shall not
merely admit the fictitious view, but proceed to found thereon the
extraordinary measures which we shall presently find indicated in his
correspondence. What the view itself is may be gathered from a few
extracts.