I advise you, and I advise the people of England, to abstain from
applying to the United States doctrines and principles which we never
apply to our own case. At any rate, they [the Americans] have never
fought "for the balance of power" in Europe. They have never fought to
keep up a decaying empire. They have never squandered the money of their
people in such a phantom expedition as we have been engaged in. And now,
at this moment, when you are told that they are going to be ruined by
their vast expenditure,--why, the sum that they are going to raise in
the great emergency of this grievous war is not greater than what we
raise every year during a time of peace.
They say they are not going to liberate slaves. No; the object of the
Washington government is to maintain their own Constitution and to act
legally, as it permits and requires. No man is more in favor of peace
than I am; no man has denounced war more than I have, probably, in this
country; few men in their public life have suffered more obloquy--I had
almost said, more indignity--in consequence of it. But I cannot for the
life of me see, upon any of those principles upon which States are
governed now,--I say nothing of the literal word of the New
Testament,--I cannot see how the state of affairs in America, with
regard to the United States government, could have been different from
what it is at this moment. We had a Heptarchy in this country, and it
was thought to be a good thing to get rid of it, and have a united
nation. If the thirty-three or thirty-four States of the American Union
can break off whenever they like, I can see nothing but disaster and
confusion throughout the whole of that continent. I say that the war, be
it successful or not, be it Christian or not, be it wise or not, is a
war to sustain the government and to sustain the authority of a great
nation; and that the people of England, if they are true to their own
sympathies, to their own history, and to their own great act of 1834, to
which reference has already been made, will have no sympathy with those
who wish to build up a great empire on the perpetual bondage of millions
of their fellow-men.