pleasure with which an Englishman lands in a country three thousand
miles off, and finds that every man he meets speaks his own language. I
recollect some years ago reading a most amusing speech delivered by a
Suffolk country gentleman, at a Suffolk agricultural dinner, I think it
was, though I do not believe the speeches of Suffolk country gentlemen
at Suffolk agricultural meetings are generally very amusing. But this
was a very amusing speech. This gentleman had travelled; he had been in
the United States, and being intelligent enough to admire much that he
saw there, he gave to his audience a description of some things that he
had seen; but that which seemed to delight him most was this, that when
he stepped from the steamer on to the quay at New York, he found that
'everybody spoke Suffolk.' Now, if anybody from this neighbourhood
should visit New York, I am afraid that he will not find everybody
speaking Lancashire. Our dialect, as you know, is vanishing into the
past. It will be preserved to future times, partly in the works of Tim
Bobbin, but in a very much better and more instructive form in the
admirable writings of one of my oldest and most valued friends, who is
now upon this platform. But if we should not find the people of New York
speaking Lancashire, we should find them speaking English. And if we
followed a little further, and asked them what they read, we should find
that they read all the books that we read that are worth reading, and a
good many of their own, some of which have not yet reached us; that
there are probably more readers in the United States of Milton, and
Shakespeare, and Dryden, and Pope, and Byron, and Wordsworth, and
Tennyson, than are to be found in this country; because, I think, it
will probably be admitted by everybody who understands the facts of both
countries, that out of the twenty millions of population in the Free
States of America, there are more persons who can read well than there
are in the thirty millions of population of Great Britain and Ireland.
And if we leave their literature and turn to their laws, we shall find
that their laws have the same basis as ours, and that many of the great
and memorable judgments of our greatest judges and lawyers are of high
authority with them. If we come to that priceless possession which we
have perhaps more clearly established than any other people in Europe,
that of personal freedom, we shall find that in the Free States of
America personal freedom is as much known, as well established, as fully
appreciated, and as completely enjoyed as it is now in this country. And
if we come to the form of their government, we shall find that it is in
its principle, in its essence, not very dissimilar from that which our
Constitution professes in this kingdom. The difference is this, that our
Constitution has never yet been fully enjoyed by the people; the House
in which forty-eight hours hence I may be sitting, is not as full and
fair and free a representation of the people as is the House of
Representatives that assembles at Washington. But, if there be
differences, are there not great points of agreement, and are there any
of these differences that justify us or them in regarding either nation
as foreign or hostile?
Now, the people of Europe owe much more than they are often aware of to
the Constitution of the United States of America, and to the existence
of that great Republic. The United States have been in point of fact an
ark of refuge to the people of Europe, when fleeing from the storms and
the revolutions of the old continent. They have been, as far as the
artisans and labouring population of this country are concerned, a life-
boat to them; and they have saved hundreds of thousands of men and of
families from disastrous shipwreck. The existence of that free country
and that free government has had a prodigious influence upon freedom in
Europe and in England. If you could have before you a chart of the
condition of Europe when the United States became a nation, and another
chart of the condition of Europe now, you would see the difference, the
enormous stride which has been made in Europe; and you may rely upon it
that not a little of it has been occasioned by the influence of the
great example of that country, free in its political institutions beyond
all other countries, and yet maintaining its course in peace, preserving
order, and conferring upon all its people a degree of prosperity which
in these old countries is as yet unknown.
I should like now to speak specially to the working men who are here,
who have no capital but their skill and their industry and their bodily
strength. In fifteen years from 1845 to 1860--and this is a fact which I
stated in this room more than a year ago, when speaking on the question
of America, but it is a fact which every working man ought to have in
his mind always when he is considering what America is--in fifteen years
there have emigrated to the United States from Great Britain and Ireland
not less than two million four hundred thousand persons. Millions are
easily spoken, not easily counted, with great difficulty comprehended;
but the twenty-four hundred thousand persons that I have described means
a population equal to not less than sixty towns, every one of them of
the size and population of Rochdale. And every one of these men who have
emigrated, as he crossed the Atlantic--if he went by steam, in a
fortnight, and if he went by sails, in a month or five weeks--found
himself in a country where to his senses a vast revolution had taken
place, comprehending all that men anticipate from any kind of revolution
that shall advance political and social equality in their own land--a
revolution which commenced in the War of Independence, which has been
going on, and which has been confirmed by all that has transpired in
subsequent years.
He does not find that he belongs to what are called the 'lower classes;'
he is not shut out from any of the rights of citizenship; he is admitted
to the full enjoyment of all political privileges, as far as they are
extended to any portion of the population; and he has there advantages
which the people of this country have not yet gained, because we are but
gradually making our way out of the darkness and the errors and the
tyrannies of past ages. But in America he finds the land not cursed with
feudalism; it is free to every man to buy and sell, and possess and
transmit. He finds in the town in which he lives that the noblest
buildings are the school-houses to which his children are freely
admitted. And among those twenty millions--for I am now confining my
observations to the Free States--the son of every man has easy admission
to school, has fair opportunity for improvement; and, if God has gifted
him with power of head and of heart; there is nothing of usefulness,
nothing of greatness, nothing of success in that country to which he may
not fairly aspire.
And, Sir, this makes a difference between that country and this, on
which I must say another word. One of the most painful things to my mind
to be seen in England is this, that amongst the great body of those
classes which earn their living by their daily labour--it is
particularly observable in the agricultural districts, and it is too
much to be observed even in our own districts--there is an absence of
that hope which every man ought to have in his soul that there is for
him, if he be industrious and frugal, a comfortable independence as he
advances in life. In the United States that hope prevails everywhere,
because everywhere there is an open career; there is no privileged
class; there is complete education extended to all, and every man feels
that he was not born to be in penury and in suffering, but that there is
no point in the social ladder to which he may not fairly hope to raise
himself by his honest efforts.
Well, looking at all this--and I have but touched on some very prominent
facts--I should say that it offers to us every motive, not for fear, not
for jealousy, not for hatred, but rather for admiration, gratitude, and
friendship. I am persuaded of this as much as I am of anything that I
know or believe, that the more perfect the friendship that is
established between the people of England and the free people of
America, the more you will find your path of progress here made easy for
you, and the more will social and political liberty advance amongst us.
But this country which I have been in part describing is now the scene
of one of the greatest calamities that can afflict mankind. After
seventy years of almost uninterrupted peace, it has become the scene of
a civil war, more gigantic, perhaps, than any that we have any record of
with regard to any other nation or any other people; for the scene of
this warfare is so extended as to embrace a region almost equal in size
to the whole of Europe. At this very moment military operations are
being undertaken at points as distant from each other as Madrid is
distant from Moscow. But this great strife cannot have arisen amongst an
educated and intelligent people without some great and overruling cause.
Let us for a moment examine that cause, and let us ask ourselves whether
it is possible at such a time to stand neutral in regard to the
contending parties, and to refuse our sympathy to one or the other of
them. I find men sometimes who profess a strict neutrality; they wish
neither the one thing nor the other. This arises either from the fact
that they are profoundly ignorant with regard to this matter, or else
that they sympathise with the South, but are rather ashamed to admit it.
There are two questions concerned in this struggle. Hitherto, generally,
one only has been discussed. There is the question whether negro slavery
shall continue to be upheld amongst Christian nations, or whether it
shall be entirely abolished. Because, bear in mind that if the result of
the struggle that is now proceeding in America should abolish slavery
within the territories of the United States, then soon after slavery in
Brazil, and slavery in Cuba, will also fall. I was speaking the other
day to a gentleman well acquainted with Cuban affairs; he is often in
the habit of seeing persons who come from Cuba to this country on
business; and I asked him what his Cuban friends said of what was going
on in America. He said, 'They speak of it with the greatest
apprehension; all the property of Cuba,' he said, 'is based on slavery;
and they say that if slavery comes to an end in America, as they believe
it will, through this war, slavery will have a very short life in Cuba.'
Therefore, the question which is being now tried is, not merely whether
four millions of slaves in America shall be free, but whether the vast
number of slaves (I know not the number) in Cuba and Brazil shall also
be liberated.
But there is another question besides that of the negro, and which to
you whom I am now addressing is scarcely less important. I say that the
question of freedom to men of all races is deeply involved in this great
strife in the United States. I said I wanted the working men of this
audience to listen to my statement, because it is to them that I
particularly wish to address myself. I say, that not only is the
question of negro slavery concerned in this struggle, but, if we are to
take the opinion of leading writers and men in the Southern States of
America, the freedom of white men is not safe in their hands. Now, I
will not trouble you with pages of extracts which would confirm all that
I am about to say, but I shall read you two or three short ones which
will explain exactly what I mean.
The city of Richmond, as you know, is the capital of what is called the
Southern Confederacy. In that city a newspaper is published, called the
_Richmond Examiner_, which is one of the most able, and perhaps
about the most influential, paper published in the Slave States. Listen
to what the _Richmond Examiner_ says:--
The experiment of universal liberty has failed. The evils of free
society are insufferable. Free society in the long run is
impracticable; it is everywhere starving, demoralizing, and
insurrectionary. Policy and humanity alike forbid the extension
of its evils to new peoples and to coming generations; and
therefore free society must fall and give way to a slave society--
a social system old as the world, universal as man.'
Well, on another occasion, the same paper treats the subject in this
way. The writer says:--
'Hitherto the defence of slavery has encountered great
difficulties, because its apologists stopped half way. They
confined the defence of slavery to negro slavery alone,
abandoning the principle of slavery, and admitting that every
other form of slavery was wrong. Now the line of defence is
changed. The South maintains that slavery is just, natural, and
necessary, and that it does not depend on the difference of
complexions.'
But following up this is an extract from a speech by a Mr. Cobb, who is
an eminent man in Southern politics and in Southern opinion. He says:--
'There is, perhaps, no solution of the great problem of
reconciling the interests of labour and capital, so as to protect
each from the encroachments and oppressions of the other, so
simple and effective as negro slavery. By making the labourer
himself capital, the conflict ceases, and the interests become
identical.'
Now, I do not know whether there is any working man here who does not
fully or partly realize the meaning of those extracts. They mean this,
that if a man in this neighbourhood (for they pity us very much in our
benighted condition as regards capital and labour, and they have an
admirable way, from their view, of putting an end to strikes)--they say
that, if a man in this neighbourhood had ten thousand pounds sterling in
a cotton or woollen factory, and he employed a hundred men, women, and
children, that instead of paying them whatever wages had been agreed
upon, allowing them to go to the other side of the town, and work where
they liked, or to move to another county, or to emigrate to America, or
to have any kind of will or wish whatever with regard to their own
disposal, that they should be to him capital, just the same as the
horses are in his stable; that he should sell the husband South,--
'South' in America means something very dreadful to the negro,--that
they should sell the wife if they liked, that they should sell the
children, that, in point of fact, they should do whatsoever they liked
with them, and that, if any one of them resisted any punishment which
the master chose to inflict, the master should be held justified if he
beat his slave to death; and that not one of those men should have the
power to give evidence in any court of justice, in any case, against a
white man, however much he might have suffered from that white man.
You will observe that this most important paper in the South writes for
that principle, and this eminent Southern politician indorses it, and
thinks it a cure for all the evils which exist in the Old World and in
the Northern and Free States; and there is not a paper in the South, nor
is there a man as eminent or more eminent than Mr. Cobb, who has dared
to write or speak in condemnation of the atrocity of that language. I
believe this great strife to have had its origin in an infamous
conspiracy against the rights of human nature. Those principles, which
they distinctly avow and proclaim, are not to be found, as far as I
know, in the pages of any heathen writer of old times, nor are they to
be discovered in the teachings or the practice of savage nations in our
times. It is the doctrine of devils, and not of men; and all mankind
should shudder at the enormity of the guilt which the leaders of this
conspiracy have brought upon that country.
Now, let us look at two or three facts, which seem to me very
remarkable, on the surface of the case, but which there are men in this
country, and I am told they may be found even in this town, who
altogether ignore and deny. The war was not commenced by those to whom
your resolution refers; it was commenced by the South; they rebelled
against the majority. It was not a rebellion against a monarchy, or an
aristocracy, or some other form of government which has its hold upon
people, sometimes by services, but often from tradition; but it was
against a Government of their own, and a compact of their own, that they
violently rebelled, and for the expressed and avowed purpose of
maintaining the institution of slavery, and for the purpose, not
disavowed, of re-opening the slave trade, and, as these extracts show,
if their principles should be fully carried out, of making bondage
universal among all classes of labourers and artisans. When I say that
their object was to re-open the slave trade, do not for a moment imagine
that I am overstating the case against them. They argue, with a perfect
logic, that, if slavery was right, the slave trade could not be wrong;
if the slave trade be wrong, slavery cannot be right; and that if it be
lawful and moral to go to the State of Virginia and buy a slave for two
thousand dollars, and take him to Louisiana, it cannot be wrong to go to
Africa, and buy a slave for fifty dollars, and take him to Louisiana.
That was their argument; it is an argument to this day, and is an
argument that in my opinion no man can controvert; and the lawful
existence of slavery is as a matter of course to be followed, and would
be followed, wherever there was the power, by the re-opening of the
traffic in negroes from Africa.
That is not all these people have done. Reference has been made, in the
resolution and in the speeches, to the distress which prevails in this
district, and you are told, and have been told over and over again, that
all this distress has arisen from the blockade of the ports of the
Southern States. There is at least one great port from which in past
times two millions of bales of cotton a-year have found their way to
Europe--the port of New Orleans--which is blockaded; and the United
States Government has proclaimed that any cotton that is sent from the
interior to New Orleans for shipment, although it belongs to persons in
arms against the Government, shall yet be permitted to go to Europe, and
they shall receive unmolested the proceeds of the sale of that cotton.
But still the cotton does not come. The reason why it does not come is,
not because it would do harm to the United States Government for it to
come, or that it would in any way assist the United States Government in
carrying on the war. The reason that it does not come is, because its
being kept back is supposed to be a way of influencing public opinion in
England and the course of the English Government in reference to the
American war. They burn the cotton that they may injure us, and they
injure us because they think that we cannot live even for a year without
their cotton; and that to get it we should send ships of war, break the
blockade, make war upon the North, and assist the slave-owners to
maintain, or to obtain, their independence.
Now, with regard to the question of American cotton, one or two extracts
will be sufficient; but I could give you a whole pamphlet of them, if it
were necessary. Mr. Mann, an eminent person in the State of Georgia,
says:--
'With the failure of the cotton, England fails. Stop her supply
of Southern slave-grown cotton, and her factories stop, her
commerce stops, the healthful normal circulation of her life-
blood stops.'
Again he says:--
'In one year from the stoppage of England's supply of Southern
slave-grown cotton, the Chartists would be in all her streets and
fields, revolution would be rampant throughout the island, and
nothing that is would exist.'
He also says, addressing an audience:--
'Why, Sirs, British lords hold their lands, British bishops hold
their revenues, Victoria holds her sceptre, by the grace of
cotton, as surely as by the grace of God.'
Senator Wigfall says:--
'If we stop the supply of cotton for one week, England would be
starving. Queen Victoria's crown would not stand on her head one
week, if the supply of cotton was stopped; nor would her head
stand on her shoulders.'
Mr. Stephens, who is the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy,
says:--
'There will be revolution in Europe, there will be starvation
there; our cotton is the element that will do it.'
Now, I am not stating the mere result of any discovery of my own, but it
would be impossible to read the papers of the South, or the speeches
made in the South, before, and at the time of, and after the secession,
without seeing that the universal opinion there was, that the stoppage
of the supply of cotton would be our instantaneous ruin, and that if
they could only lay hold of it, keep it back in the country, or burn it,
so that it never could be used, that then the people of Lancashire,
merchants, manufacturers, and operatives in mills--everybody dependent
upon this vast industry--would immediately arise and protest against the
English Government abstaining for one moment from the recognition of the
South, from war with the North, and from a resolution to do the utmost
that we could to create a slave-holding independent republic in the
South.
And these very men who have been wishing to drag us into a war that
would have covered us with everlasting infamy, have sent their envoys to
this country, Mr. Yancey, Mr. Mann (I do not know whether or not the
same Mr. Mann to whom I have been referring), and Mr. Mason, the author
of the Fugitive Slave Law. These men have been in this country,--one of
them I believe is here now,--envoys sent to offer friendship to the
Queen of England, to be received at her Court, and to make friends with
the great men in London. They come,--I have seen them under the gallery
of the House of Commons; I have seen Members of the House shaking hands
with them and congratulating them, if there has been some military
success on their side, and receiving them as if they were here from the
most honourable Government, and with the most honourable mission. Why,
the thing which they have broken off from the United States to maintain,
is felony by your law. They are not only slave owners, slave buyers and
sellers, but that which out of Pandemonium itself was never before
conceived,--they are slave breeders for the slave market; and these men
have come to your country, and are to be met with at elegant tables in
London, and are in fast friendship with some of your public men, and are
constantly found in some of your newspaper offices; and they are here to
ask Englishmen--Englishmen with a history of freedom--to join hands with
their atrocious conspiracy.
I regret more than I have words to express this painful fact, that of
all the countries in Europe this country is the only one which has men
in it who are willing to take active steps in favour of this intended
slave government. We supply the ships; we supply the arms, the munitions
of war; we give aid and comfort to this foulest of all crimes.
Englishmen only do it. I believe you have not seen a single statement in
the newspapers that any French, or Belgian, or Dutch, or Russian ship
has been engaged in, or seized whilst attempting to violate the blockade
and to carry arms to the South. They are English Liberal newspapers only
which support this stupendous iniquity. They are English statesmen only,
who profess to be liberal, who have said a word to favour the authors of
this now--enacting revolution in America.
The other day, not a week since, a member of the present Government,--he
is not a statesman--he is the son of a great statesman, and occupies the
position of Secretary for Ireland,--he dared to say to an English
audience that he wished the Republic to be divided, and that the South
should become an independent State. If that island which--I suppose in
punishment for some of its offences--has been committed to his care,--if
that island were to attempt to secede, not to set up a slave kingdom,
but a kingdom more free than it has ever yet been, the Government of
which he is a member would sack its cities and drench its soil with
blood before they would allow such a kingdom to be established.