ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

I came to America to see and hear, not to lecture. But when I was

invited by the Boston "Fraternity" to lecture in their course, and

permitted to take the relations between England and America as my

subject, I did not feel at liberty to decline the invitation. England is

my country. To America, though an alien by birth, I am, as an English

Liberal, no alien in heart. I deeply share the desire of all my

political friends in England and of the leaders of my party to banish

ill-feeling and promote good-will between the two kindred nations. My

heart would be cold, if that desire were not increased by the welcome

which I have met with here. More than once, when called upon to speak,

(a task little suited to my habits and powers,) I have tried to make it

understood that the feelings of England as a nation towards you in your

great struggle had not been truly represented by a portion of our press.

Some of my present hearers may, perhaps, have seen very imperfect

reports of those speeches. I hope to say what I have to say with a

little more clearness now.

There was between England and America the memory of ancient quarrels,

which your national pride did not suffer to sleep, and which sometimes

galled a haughty nation little patient of defeat. In more recent times

there had been a number of disputes, the more angry because they were

between brethren. There had been disputes about boundaries, in which

England believed herself to have been overreached by your negotiators,

or, what was still more irritating, to have been overborne because her

main power was not here. There had been disputes about the Right of

Search, in which we had to taste the bitterness, now not unknown to you,

of those whose sincerity in a good cause is doubted, when, in fact, they

are perfectly sincere. You had alarmed and exasperated us by your Ostend

manifesto and your scheme for the annexation of Cuba. In these

discussions some of your statesmen had shown towards us the spirit which

Slavery does not fail to engender in the domestic tyrant; while,

perhaps, some of our statesmen had been too ready to presume bad

intentions and anticipate wrong. In our war with Russia your sympathies

had been, as we supposed, strongly on the Russian side; and we--even

those among us who least approved the war--had been scandalized at

seeing the American Republic in the arms of a despotism which had just

crushed Hungary, and which stood avowed as the arch-enemy of liberty in

Europe. In the course of that war an English envoy committed a fault by

being privy to recruiting in your territories. The fault was

acknowledged; but the matter was pressed by your Government in a temper

which we thought showed a desire to humiliate, and a want of that

readiness to accept satisfaction, when frankly tendered, which renders

the reparation of an unintentional offence easy and painless between men

of honor. These wounds had been inflamed by the unfriendly criticism of

English writers, who visited a new country without the spirit of

philosophic inquiry, and who in collecting materials for the amusement

of their countrymen sometimes showed themselves a little wanting in

regard for the laws of hospitality, as well as in penetration and in

largeness of view.

Yet beneath this outward estrangement there lay in the heart of England

at least a deeper feeling, an appeal to which was never unwelcome, even

in quarters where the love of American institutions least prevailed. I

will venture to repeat some words from a lecture addressed a short time

before this war to the University of Oxford, which at that time had

among its students an English Prince. "The loss of the American

Colonies," said the lecturer, speaking of your first Revolution, "was

perhaps in itself a gain to both countries. It was a gain, as it

emancipated commerce and gave free course to those reciprocal streams of

wealth which a restrictive policy had forbidden to flow. It was a gain,

as it put an end to an obsolete tutelage, which tended to prevent

America from learning betimes to walk alone, while it gave England the

puerile and somewhat dangerous pleasure of reigning over those whom she

did not and could not govern, but whom she was tempted to harass and

insult. A source of military strength colonies can scarcely be. You

prevent them from forming proper military establishments of their own,

and you drag them, into your quarrels at the price of undertaking their

defence. The inauguration of free trade was in fact the renunciation of

the only solid object for which our ancestors clung to an invidious and

perilous supremacy, and exposed the heart of England by scattering her

fleet and armies over the globe. It was not the loss of the Colonies,

but the quarrel, that was one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest

disaster that ever befell the English race. Who would not give up

Blenheim and Waterloo, if only the two Englands could have parted from

each other in kindness and in peace,--if our statesmen could have had

the wisdom, to say to the Americans generously and at the right season,

'You are Englishmen, like ourselves; be, for your own happiness and for

our honor, like ourselves, a nation'? But English statesmen, with all

their greatness, have seldom known how to anticipate necessity; too

often the sentence of history on their policy has been, that it was

wise, just, and generous, but too late. Too often have they waited for

the teaching of disaster. Time will heal this, like other wounds. In

signing away his own empire, George III. did not sign away the empire of

English liberty, of English law, of English literature, of English

religion, of English blood, or of the English tongue. But though the

wound will heal,--and that it may heal ought to be the earnest desire of

the whole English name,--history can never cancel the fatal page which

robs England of half the glory and half the happiness of being the

mother of a great nation." Such, I say, was the language addressed to

Oxford in the full confidence that it would be well received.

And now all these clouds seemed to have fairly passed away. Your

reception of the Prince of Wales, the heir and representative of George

III., was a perfect pledge of reconciliation. It showed that beneath a

surface of estrangement there still remained the strong tie of blood.

Englishmen who loved the New England as well as the Old were for the

moment happy in the belief that the two were one again. And, believe me,

joy at this complete renewal of our amity was very deeply and widely

felt in England. It spread far even among the classes which have shown

the greatest want of sympathy for you in the present war.

England has diplomatic connections--she has sometimes diplomatic

intrigues--with the Great Powers of Europe. For a real alliance she must

look here. Strong as is the element of aristocracy in her Government,

there is that in her, nevertheless, which makes her cordial

understandings with military despotisms little better than smothered

hate. With you she may have a league of the heart. We are united by

blood. We are united by a common allegiance to the cause of freedom. You

may think that English freedom falls far short of yours. You will allow

that it goes beyond any yet attained by the great European nations, and

that to those nations it has been and still is a light of hope. I see it

treated with contempt here. It is not treated with contempt by

Garibaldi. It is not treated with contempt by the exiles from French

despotism, who are proud to learn the English tongue, and who find in

our land, as they think, the great asylum of the free. Let England and

America quarrel. Let your weight be cast into the scale against us, when

we struggle with the great conspiracy of absolutist powers around us,

and the hope of freedom in Europe would be almost quenched. Hampden and

Washington in arms against each other! What could the Powers of Evil

desire more? When Americans talk lightly of a war with England, one

desires to ask them what they believe the effects of such a war would be

on their own country. How many more American wives do they wish to make

widows? How many more American children do they wish to make orphans? Do

they deem it wise to put a still greater strain on the already groaning

timbers of the Constitution? Do they think that the suspension of trade

and emigration, with the price of labor rising and the harvests of

Illinois excluded from their market, would help you to cope with the

financial difficulties which fill with anxiety every reflecting mind? Do

they think that four more years of war-government would render easy the

tremendous work of reconstruction? But the interests of the great

community of nations are above the private interests of America or of

England. If war were to break out between us, what would become of

Italy, abandoned without help to her Austrian enemy and her sinister

protector? What would become of the last hopes of liberty in France?

What would become of the world?

English liberties, imperfect as they may be,--and as an English Liberal

of course thinks they are,--are the source from which your liberties

have flowed, though the river may be more abundant than the spring.

Being in America, I am in England,--not only because American

hospitality makes me feel that I am still in my own country, but because

our institutions are fundamentally the same. The great foundations of

constitutional government, legislative assemblies, parliamentary

representation, personal liberty, self-taxation, the freedom of the

press, allegiance to the law as a power above individual will,--all

these were established, not without memorable efforts and memorable

sufferings, in the land from which the fathers of your republic came.

You are living under the Great Charter, the Petition of Eight, the

Habeas Corpus Act, the Libel Act. Perhaps you have not even yet taken

from us all that, if a kindly feeling continues between us, you may find

it desirable to take. England by her eight centuries of constitutional

progress has done a great work for you, and the two nations may yet have

a great work to do together for themselves and for the world. A student

of history, knowing how the race has struggled and stumbled onwards

through the ages until now, cannot believe in the finality and

perfection of any set of institutions, not even of yours. This vast

electioneering apparatus, with its strange machinery and discordant

sounds, in the midst of which I find myself,--it may be, and I firmly

believe it is, better for its purpose than anything that has gone before

it; but is it the crowning effort of mankind? If our creed--the Liberal

creed--be true, American institutions are a great step in advance of the

Old World; but they are not a miraculous leap into a political

millennium. They are a momentous portion of that continual onward effort

of humanity which it is the highest duty of history to trace; but they

are not its final consummation. Model Republic! How many of these models

has the course of ages seen broken and flung disdainfully aside! You

have been able to do great things for the world because your forefathers

did great things for you. The generation will come which in its turn

will inherit the fruits of your efforts, add to them a little of its

own, and in the plenitude of its self-esteem repay you with ingratitude.

The time will come when the memory of the Model Republicans of the

United States, as well as that of the narrow Parliamentary Reformers of

England, will appeal to history, not in vain, to rescue it from the

injustice of posterity, and extend to it the charities of the past.

New-comers among the nations, you desire, like the rest, to have a

history. You seek it in Indian annals, you seek it in Northern sagas.

You fondly surround an old windmill with the pomp of Scandinavian

antiquity, in your anxiety to fill up the void of your unpeopled past.

But you have a real and glorious history, if you will not reject

it,--monuments genuine and majestic, if you will acknowledge them as

your own. Yours are the palaces of the Plantagenets,--the cathedrals

which enshrined our old religion,--the illustrious hall in which the

long line of our great judges reared, by their decisions, the fabric of

our law,--the gray colleges in which our intellect and science found

their earliest home,--the graves where our heroes and sages and poets

sleep. It would as ill become you to cultivate narrow national memories

in regard to the past as it would to cultivate narrow national

prejudices at present. You have come out, as from other relics of

barbarism which still oppress Europe, so from the barbarism of jealous

nationality. You are heirs to all the wealth of the Old World, and must

owe gratitude for a part of your heritage to Germany, France, and Spain,

as well as to England. Still, it is from England that you are sprung;

from her you brought the power of self-government which was the talisman

of colonization and the pledge of your empire here. She it was, that,

having advanced by centuries of effort to the front of the Old World,

became worthy to give birth to the New. From England you are sprung; and

if the choice were given you among all the nations of the world, which

would you rather choose for a mother?

England bore you, and bore you not without a mother's pangs. For the

real hour of your birth wag the English Revolution of the seventeenth

century, at once the saddest and the noblest period of English

history,--the noblest, whether we look to the greatness of the

principles at stake, or to the grandeur of the actors who fill the

scene. This is not the official version of your origin. The official

version makes you the children of the revolutionary spirit which was

abroad in the eighteenth century and culminated in the French

Revolution. But this robs you of a century and a half of antiquity, and

of more than a century and a half of greatness. Since 1783 you have had

a marvellous growth of population and of wealth,--things not to be

spoken of, as cynics have spoken of them, without thankfulness, since

the added myriads have been happy, and the wealth has flowed not to a

few, but to all. But before 1783 you had founded, under the name of an

English Colony, a community emancipated from feudalism; you had

abolished here and doomed to general abolition hereditary aristocracy,

and that which is the essential basis of hereditary aristocracy,

primogeniture in the inheritance of land. You had established, though

under the semblance of dependence on the English crown, a virtual

sovereignty of the people. You had created the system of common schools,

in which the sovereignty of the people has its only safe foundation. You

had proclaimed, after some misgivings and backslidings, the doctrine of

liberty of conscience, and released the Church from her long bondage to

the State. All this you had achieved while you still were, and gloried

in being, a colony of England. You have done great things, since your

quarrel with George III., for the world as well as for yourselves. But

for the world, perhaps, you had done greater things before.

In England the Revolution of the seventeenth century failed. It failed,

at least, as an attempt to establish social equality and liberty of

conscience. The feudal past, with a feudal Europe to support it, sat too

heavy on us to be cast off. By a convulsive effort we broke loose, for a

moment, from the hereditary aristocracy and the hierarchy. For a moment

we placed a popular chief in power, though Cromwell was obliged by

circumstances, as well as impelled by his own ambition, to make himself

a king. But when Cromwell died before his hour, all was over for many a

day with the party of religious freedom and of the people. The nation

had gone a little way out of the feudal and hierarchical Egypt; but the

horrors of the unknown Wilderness, and the memory of the flesh-pots,

overpowered the hope of the Promised Land; and the people returned to

the rule of Pharaoh and his priests amidst the bonfires of the

Restoration. Something had been gained. Kings became more careful how

they cut the subject's purse; bishops, how they clipped the subject's

ears. Instead of being carried by Laud to Rome, we remained Protestants

after a sort, though without liberty of conscience. Our Parliament, such

as it was, with a narrow franchise and rotten boroughs, retained its

rights; and in time we secured the independence of the judges and the

integrity of an aristocratic law. But the great attempt had miscarried.

English society had made a supreme effort to escape from feudalism and

the hierarchy into social justice and religious freedom, and that effort

had failed.

Failed in England, but succeeded here. The yoke which in the

mother-country we had not strength to throw off, in the colony we

escaped; and here, beyond the reach of the Restoration, Milton's vision

proved true, and a free community was founded, though in a humble and

unsuspected form, which depended on the life of no single chief, and

lived on when Cromwell died. Milton, when the night of the Restoration

closed on the brief and stormy day of his party, bated no jot of hope.

He was strong in that strength of conviction which assures spirits like

his of the future, however dark the present may appear. But, could he

have beheld it, the morning, moving westward in the track of the Puritan

emigrants, had passed from his hemisphere only to shine again in this

with no fitful ray, but with a steady brightness which will one day

reillumine the feudal darkness of the Old World.

The Revolution failed in England. Yet in England the party of Cromwell

and Milton still lives. It still lives; and in this great crisis of your

fortunes, its heart turns to you. On your success ours depends. Now, as

in the seventeenth century, the thread of our fate is twined with the

thread of yours. An English Liberal comes here, not only to watch the

unfolding of your destiny, but to read his own.

Even in the Revolution of 1776 Liberal England was on your side. Chatham

was your spokesman, as well as Patrick Henry. We, too, reckon Washington

among our heroes. Perhaps there may have been an excuse even for the

King. The relation of dependence which you as well as he professed to

hold sacred, and which he was bound to maintain, had long become

obsolete. It was time to break the cord which held the child to its

mother; and probably there were some on your side, from the first, or

nearly from the first, resolved to break it,--men instinct with the

revolutionary spirit, and bent on a Republic. All parties were in a

false position; and they could find no way out of it better than civil

war. Good-will, not hatred, is the law of the world; and seldom can

history--even the history of the conqueror--look back on the results of

war without regret. England, scarcely guilty of the offence of her

monarch, drank the cup of shame and disaster to the dregs. That war

ruined the French finances, which till then might have been retrieved,

past the hope of redemption, and precipitated the Revolution which

hurled France through anarchy into despotism, and sent Lafayette to a

foreign dungeon, and his master to the block. You came out victorious;

but, from the violence of the rupture, you took a political bias not

perhaps entirely for good; and the necessity of the war blended you,

under equivocal conditions, with other colonies of a wholly different

origin and character, which then "held persons to service," and are now

your half-dethroned tyrant, the Slave Power. This Revolution will lead

to a revision of many things,--perhaps to a partial revision of your

history. Meantime, let me repeat, England counts Washington among her

heroes.

And now as to the conduct of England towards you in this civil war. It

is of want of sympathy, if of anything, on our part, not of want of

interest, that you have a right to complain. Never, within my memory,

have the hearts of Englishmen been so deeply moved by any foreign

struggle as by this civil war,--not even, if I recollect aright, by the

great European earthquake of 1848. I doubt whether they were more moved

by the Indian mutiny or by our war with Russia. It seemed that history

had brought round again the great crisis of the Thirty Years' War, when

all England throbbed with the mortal struggle waged between the powers

of Liberty and Slavery on their German battle-field; for expectation can

scarcely have been more intense when Gustavus and Tilly were approaching

each other at Leipsic than it was when Meade and Lee were approaching

each other at Gettysburg. Severed from us by the Atlantic, while other

nations are at our door, you are still nearer to us than all the world

beside.

It is of want of sympathy, not of want of interest, that you have to

complain. And the sympathy which has been withheld is not that of the

whole nation, but that of certain classes, chiefly of the class against

whose political interest you are fighting, and to whom your victory

brings eventual defeat. The real origin of your nation is the key to the

present relations between you and the different parties in England. This

is the old battle waged again on a new field. We will not talk too much

of Puritans and Cavaliers. The soldiers of the Union are not Puritans,

neither are the planters Cavaliers, But the present civil war is a vast

episode in the same irrepressible conflict between Aristocracy and

Democracy; and the heirs of the Cavalier in England sympathize with your

enemies, the heirs of the Puritan with you.

The feeling of our aristocracy, as of all aristocracies, is against you.

It does not follow, nor do I believe, that as a body they would desire

or urge their Government to do you a wrong, whatever spirit may be shown

by a few of the less honorable or more violent members of their order.

With all their class sentiments, they are Englishmen, trained to walk in

the paths of English policy and justice. But that their feelings should

be against you is not strange. You are fighting, not for the restoration

of the Union, not for the emancipation of the negro, but for Democracy

against Aristocracy; and this fact is thoroughly understood by both

parties throughout the Old World. As the champions of Democracy, you may

claim, and you receive, the sympathy of the Democratic party in England

and in Europe; that of the Aristocratic party you cannot claim. You must

bear it calmly, if the aristocracies mourn over your victories and

triumph over your defeats. Do the friends of Democracy conceal their joy

when a despotism or an oligarchy bites the dust?

The members of our aristocracy bear you no personal hatred. An American

going among them even now meets with nothing but personal courtesy and

kindness. Under ordinary circumstances they are not indifferent to your

good-will, nor unconscious of the tie of blood. But to ask them entirely

to forget their order would be too much. In the success of a

commonwealth founded on social and political equality all aristocracies

must read their doom. Not by arms, but by example, you are a standing

menace to the existence of political privilege. And the thread of that

existence is frail. Feudal antiquity holds life by a precarious tenure

amidst the revolutionary tendencies of this modern world. It has gone

hard with the aristocracies throughout Europe of late years, though the

French Emperor, as the head of the Reaction, may create a mock nobility

round his upstart throne. The Roman aristocracy was an aristocracy of

arms and law. The feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages was an

aristocracy of arms and in some measure of law; it served the cause of

political progress in its hour and after its kind; it confronted

tyrannical kings when the people were as yet too weak to confront them;

it conquered at Runnymede, as well as at Hastings. But the aristocracies

of modern Europe are aristocracies neither of arms nor of law. They are

aristocracies of social and political privilege alone. They owe, and are

half conscious that they owe, their present existence only to factitious

weaknesses of human nature, and to the antiquated terrors of communities

long kept in leading-strings and afraid to walk alone. If there were

nothing but reason to dispel them, these fears might long retain their

sway over European society. But the example of a great commonwealth

flourishing here without a privileged class, and of a popular

sovereignty combining order with progress, tends, however remotely, to

break the spell. Therefore, as a class, the English nobility cannot

desire the success of your Republic. Some of the order there are who

have hearts above their coronets, as there are some kings who have

hearts above their crowns, and who in this great crisis of humanity

forget that they are noblemen, and remember that they are men. But the

order, as a whole, has been against you, and has swayed in the same

direction all who were closely connected with it or dependent on it. It

could not fail to be against you, if it was for itself. Be charitable to

the instinct of self-preservation. It is strong, sometimes violent, in

us all.

In truth, it is rather against the Liberals of England than against you

that the feeling of our aristocracy is directed. Liberal leaders have

made your name odious by pointing to your institutions as the

condemnation of our own. They did this too indiscriminately perhaps,

while in one respect your institutions were far below our own, inasmuch

as you were a slaveholding nation. "Look," they were always saying, "at

the Model Republic,--behold its unbroken prosperity, the harmony of its

people under the system of universal suffrage, the lightness of its

taxation,--behold, above all, its immunity from war!" All this is now

turned upon us as a taunt; but the taunt implies rather a sense of

escape on the part of those who utter it than malignity, and the answer

to it is victory.

What has been said of our territorial aristocracy may be said of our

commercial aristocracy, which is fast blending with the territorial into

a government of wealth. This again is nothing new. History can point to

more cases than one in which the sympathies of rich men have been

regulated by their riches. The Money Power has been cold to your cause

throughout Europe,--perhaps even here. In all countries great

capitalists are apt to desire that the laborer should be docile and

contented, that popular education should not be carried dangerously

high, that the right relations between capital and labor should be

maintained. The bold doctrines of the slave-owner as to "free labor and

free schools" may not be accepted in their full strength; yet they touch

a secret chord. But we have friends of the better cause among our

English capitalists as well as among our English peers. The names of Mr.

Baring and Mr. Thomas Bayley Potter are not unknown here. The course

taken by such men at this crisis is an earnest of the essential unity of

interest which underlies all class-divisions,--which, in our onward

progress toward the attainment of a real community, will survive all

class-distinctions, and terminate the conflict between capital and

labor, not by making the laborer the slave of the capitalist, nor the

capitalist the slave of the laborer, but by establishing between them

mutual good-will, founded on intelligence and justice.

And let the upper classes of England have their due. The Lancashire

operatives have been upon the other side; yet not the less have they

received ready and generous help in their distress from all ranks and

orders in the land.

It would be most unworthy of a student of history to preach vulgar

hatred of an historic aristocracy. The aristocracy of England has been

great in its hour, probably beneficent, perhaps indispensable to the

progress of our nation, and so to the foundation of yours. Do you wish

for your revenge upon it? The road to that revenge is sure. Succeed in

your great experiment. Show by your example, by your moderation and

self-control through this war and after its close, that it is possible

for communities, duly educated, to govern themselves without the control

of an hereditary order. The progress of opinion in England will in time

do the rest. War, forced by you upon the English nation, would only

strengthen the worst part of the English aristocracy in the worst way,

by bringing our people into collision with a Democracy, and by giving

the ascendancy, as all wars not carried on for a distinct moral object

do, to military passions over political aspirations. Our war with the

French Republic threw back our internal reforms, which till then had

been advancing, for a whole generation. Even the pockets of our

land-owners would not suffer, but gain, by the war; for their rents

would be raised by the exclusion of your corn, and the price of labor

would be lowered by the stoppage of emigration. The suffering would

fall, as usual, on the people.

The gradual effect of your example may enable European society finally

to emerge from feudalism, in a peaceful way, without violent

revolutions. Every one who has studied history must regard violent

revolutions with abhorrence. A European Liberal ought to be less

inclined to them than ever, when he has seen America, and received from

the sight, as I think he may, a complete assurance of the future.

I have spoken of our commercial aristocracy generally. Liverpool demands

word by itself. It is the stronghold of the Southern party in England:

from it hostile acts have proceeded, while from other quarters there

have proceeded only hostile words. There are in Liverpool men who do

honor to the name of British merchant; but the city as a whole is not

the one among all our commercial cities in which moral chivalry is most

likely to be found. In Manchester, cotton-spinning though it be, there

is much that is great,--a love of Art, displayed in public

exhibitions,--a keen interest in great political and social

questions,--literature,--even religious thought,--something of that high

aspiring spirit which made commerce noble in the old English merchant,

in the Venetian and the Florentine. In Liverpool trade reigns supreme,

and its behests, whatever they may be, are pretty sure to be eagerly

obeyed. And the source of this is to be found, perhaps, partly in the

fact that Liverpool is an old centre of the Slavery interest in England,

one of the cities which have been built with the blood of the slave. As

the great cotton port, it is closely connected with the planters by

trade,--perhaps also by many personal ties and associations. It is not

so much an English city as an offset and outpost of the South, and a

counterpart to the offsets and outposts of the South in some of your

great commercial cities here. No doubt, the shame of Liverpool Alabamas

falls on England. England must own that she has produced merchants who

disgrace their calling, contaminated by intercourse with the

slave-owner, regardless of the honor and interest of their country,

ready to plunge two kindred nations into a desolating war, if they can

only secure the profits of their own trade. England must own that she

has produced such men; but does this disgrace attach to her alone?

The clergy of the State Church, like the aristocracy, have probably been

as a body against you in this struggle. In their case too, not hatred of

America, but the love of their own institution, is the cause. If you are

a standing menace to aristocracies, you are equally a standing menace to

State Churches. A State Church rests upon the assumption that religion

would fall, if it were not supported by the State. On this ground it is

that the European nations endure the startling anomalies of their State

Churches,--the interference of irreligious politicians in religion, the

worldliness of ambitious ecclesiastics, the denial of liberty of

conscience, the denial of truth. Therefore it is that they will see the

canker of doubt slowly eating into faith beneath the outward uniformity

of a political Church, rather than risk a change, which, as they are

taught to believe, would bring faith to a sudden end. But the success of

the voluntary system here is overthrowing this assumption. Shall I

believe that Christianity deprived of State support must fall, when I

see it without State support not only standing, but advancing with the

settler into the remotest West? Will the laity of Europe long remain

under their illusion in face of this great fact? Already the State

Churches of Europe are placed in imminent peril by the controversies

which, since religious life has reawakened among us, rend them from

within, and by their manifest inability to satisfy the craving of

society for new assurance of its faith. I cannot much blame the

High-Church bishop who goes to Lord Palmerston to ask for intervention

in company with Lord Clanricarde and Mr. Spence. You express surprise

that the son of Wilberforce is not with you; but Wilberforce was not,

like his son, a bishop of the State Church. Never in the whole course of

history has the old order of things yielded without a murmur to the new.

You share the fate of all innovators: your innovations are not received

with favor by the powers which they threaten ultimately to sweep away.

To come from our aristocracy and landed gentry to our middle class. We

subdivide the middle class into upper and lower. The upper middle class,

comprising the wealthier tradesmen, forms a sort of minor aristocracy in

itself, with a good deal of aristocratic feeling towards those beneath

it. It is not well educated, for it will not go to the common schools,

and it has few good private schools of its own; consequently, it does

not think deeply on great political questions. It is at present very

wealthy; and wealth, as you know, does not always produce high moral

sentiment. It is not above a desire to be on the genteel side. It is not

free from the worship of Aristocracy. That worship is rooted in the

lower part of our common nature. Is fibres extend beyond the soil of

England, beyond the soil of Europe. America has been much belied, if she

is entirely free from this evil, if there are not here also men careful

of class-distinctions, of a place in fashionable society, of factitious

rank which parodies the aristocracy of the Old World. There is in the

Anglo-Saxon character a strange mixture of independence and servility.

In that long course of concessions by which your politicians

strove--happily for the world and for yourselves they strove in vain--to

conciliate the slave owning aristocracy of the South, did not something

of social servility mingle with political fear?

In the lower middle class religious Non-Conformity prevails; and the

Free Churches of our Non-Conformists are united by a strong bond of

sympathy with the Churches under the voluntary system here. They are

perfectly stanch on the subject of Slavery, and so far as this war has

been a struggle against that institution, it may, I think, be

confidently said that the hearts of this great section of our people

have been upon your side. Our Non-Conformist ministers came forward, as

you are aware, in large numbers, to join with the ministers of

Protestant Churches on the Continent in an Anti-Slavery address to your

Government and people.

And as to the middle classes generally, upper or lower, I see no reason

to think that they are wanting in good-will to this country, much less

that they desire that any calamity should befall it. The journals which

I take to be the chief organs of the upper middle class, if they have

not been friendly, have been hostile not so much to the American people

as to the war. And in justice to all classes of Englishmen, it must be

remembered that hatred of the war is not hatred of the American people.

No one hated the war at its commencement more heartily than I did. I

hated it more heartily than ever after Bull Run, when, by the accounts

which reached England, the character of this nation seemed to have

completely broken down. I believed as fully as any one, that the task

which you had undertaken was hopeless, and that you were rushing on your

ruin. I dreaded the effect on your Constitution, fearing, as others did,

that civil war would bring you to anarchy, and anarchy to military

despotism. All historical precedents conspired to lead me to this

belief. I did not know--for there was no example to teach me--the power

of a really united people, the adamantine strength of institutions which

were truly free. Watching the course of events with an open mind, and a

deep interest, such as men at a distance can seldom be brought to feel,

in the fortunes of this country, I soon revised my opinion. Yet, many

times I desponded, and wished with all my heart that you would save the

Border States, if you could, and let the rest go. Numbers of

Englishmen,--Englishmen of all classes and parties,--who thought as I

did at the outset, remain rooted in this opinion. They still sincerely

believe that this is a hopeless war, which can lead to nothing but waste

of blood, subversion of your laws and liberties, and the destruction of

your own prosperity and that of the nations whose interests are bound up

with yours. This belief they maintain with as little of ill-feeling

towards you as men can have towards those who obstinately disregard

their advice. And, after all, though you may have found the wisest as

well as the bravest counsellors in your own hearts, he need not be your

enemy who somewhat timidly counsels you against civil war. Civil war is

a terrible thing,--terrible in the passions which it kindles, as well as

in the blood which it sheds,--terrible in its present effects, and

terrible in those which it leaves behind. It can be justified only by

the complete victory of the good cause. And Englishmen, at the

commencement of this civil war, if they were wrong in thinking the

victory of the good cause hopeless, were not wrong in thinking it

remote. They were not wrong in thinking it far more remote than you did.

Years of struggle, of fear, of agony, of desolated homes, have passed

since your statesmen declared that a few months would bring the

Rebellion to an end. In justice to our people, put the question to

yourselves,--if at the outset the veil which hid the future could have

been withdrawn, and the conflict which really awaited you, with all its

vicissitudes, its disasters, its dangers, its sacrifices, could have

been revealed to your view, would you have gone into the war? To us,

looking with anxious, but less impassioned eyes, the veil was half

withdrawn, and we shrank back from the prospect which was revealed. It

was well for the world, perhaps, that you were blind; but it was

pardonable in us to see.

We now come to the working-men of England, the main body of our people,

whose sympathy you would not the less prize, and whom you would not the

less shrink from assailing without a cause, because at present the

greater part of them are without political power,--at least of a direct

kind. I will not speak of the opinions of our peasantry, for they have

none. Their thoughts are never turned to a political question. They

never read a newspaper. They are absorbed in the struggle for daily

bread, of which they have barely enough for themselves and their

children. Their condition, in spite of all the benevolent effort that is

abroad among us, is the great blot of our social system. Perhaps, if the

relation between the two countries remains kindly, the door of hope may

be opened to them here; and hands now folded helplessly in English

poor-houses may joyfully reap the harvests of Iowa and Wisconsin.

Assuredly, they bear you no ill-will. If they could comprehend the

meaning of this struggle, their hearts as well as their interests would

be upon your side. But it is not in them, it is in the working-men of

our cities, that the intelligence of the class resides. And the sympathy

of the working-men of our cities, from the moment when the great issue

between Free Labor and Slavery was fairly set before them, has been

shown in no doubtful form. They have followed your wavering fortunes

with eyes almost as keen and hearts almost as anxious as your own. They

have thronged the meetings held by the Union and Emancipation Societies

of London and Manchester to protest before the nation in favor of your

cause. Early in the contest they filled to overflowing Exeter Hall, the

largest place of meeting in London. I was present at another immense

meeting of them, held by their Trades Unions in London, where they were

addressed by Mr. Bright; and had you witnessed the intelligence and

enthusiasm with which they followed the exposition of your case by their

great orator, you would have known that you were not without sympathy in

England,--not without sympathy such as those who look rather to the

worth of a friend than to his rank may most dearly prize. Again I was

present at a great meeting called in the Free-Trade Hall at Manchester

to protest against the attacks upon your commerce, and saw the same

enthusiasm displayed by the working-men of the North. But Mr. Ward

Beecher must have brought back with him abundant assurance of the

feelings of our working-men. Our opponents have tried to rival us in

these demonstrations. They have tried with great resources of personal

influence and wealth. But, in spite of their personal influence and the

distress caused by the cotton famine, they have on the whole signally

failed. Their consolation has been to call the friends of the Federal

cause obscurities and nobodies. And true it is that the friends of the

Federal cause are obscurities and nobodies. They are the untitled and

undistinguished mass of the English people.

The leaders of our working-men, the popular chiefs of the day, the men

who represent the feelings and interests of the masses, and whose names

are received with ringing cheers wherever the masses are assembled, are

Cobden and Bright. And Cobden and Bright have not left you in doubt of

the fact that they and all they represent are on your side.

I need not say,--for you have shown that you know it well,--that, as

regards the working-men of our cotton-factories, this sympathy was an

offering to your cause as costly as it was sincere. Your civil war

paralyzed their industry, brought ruin into their houses, deprived them

and their families not only of bread, but, so far as their vision

extended, of the hope of bread. Yet they have not wavered in their

allegiance to the Right. Your slave-owning aristocracy had made up their

minds that chivalry was confined to aristocracies, and that over the

vulgar souls of the common people Cotton must be King. The working-man

of Manchester, though he lives not like a Southern gentleman by the

sweat of another's brow, but like a plebeian by the sweat of his own,

has shown that chivalry is not confined to aristocracies, and that even

over vulgar souls Cotton is not always King. I heard one of your

statesmen the other day, after speaking indignantly of those who had

fitted out the Alabama, pray God to bless the working-men of England.

Our nation, like yours, is not a single body animated by the same

political sentiments, but a mixed mass of contending interests and

parties. Beware how you fire into that mass, or your shot may strike a

friend.

When England in the mass is spoken of as your enemy on this occasion,

the London "Times" is taken for the voice of the country. The "Times"

was in former days a great popular organ. It led vehemently and even

violently the struggle for Parliamentary Reform. In that way it made its

fortune; and having made its fortune, it takes part with the rich. Its

proprietor in those days was a man with many faults, but he was a man of

the people. Aristocratic society disliked and excluded him; he lived at

war with it to the end. Affronted by the Whigs, he became in a certain

sense a Tory; but he united his Toryism with Chartism, and was sent to

Parliament for Nottingham by Tories and Chartists combined. The

opposition of his journal to our New Poor-Law evinced, though in a

perverse way, his feeling for the people. But his heir, the present

proprietor, was born in the purple. He is a wealthy landed gentleman. He

sits in Parliament for a constituency of landlords. He is thought to

have been marked out for a peerage. It is accusing him of no crime to

suppose, that, so far as he controls the "Times," it takes the bias of

his class, and that its voice, if it speaks his sentiments, is not that

of the English people, but of a rich conservative squire.

The editor is distinct from the proprietor, but his connections are

perhaps still more aristocratic. A good deal has been said among us of

late about his position. Before his time our journalism was not only

anonymous, but impersonal. The journalist wore the mask not only to

those whom he criticized, but to all the world. The present editor of

the "Times" wears the mask to the objects of his criticism, but drops

it, as has been remarked in Parliament, in "the gilded saloons" of rank

and power. Not content to remain in the privacy which protected the

independence of his predecessors, he has come forth in his own person to

receive the homage of the great world. That homage has been paid in no

stinted measure, and, as the British public has been apprised in rather

a startling manner, with a somewhat intoxicating effect. The lords of

the Money Power, the thrones and dominions of Usury, have shown

themselves as assiduous as ministers and peers; and these potentates

happen, like the aristocracy, to be unfriendly to your cause. Caressed

by peers and millionnaires, the editor of the "Times" could hardly fail

to express the feelings of peers and millionnaires towards a Republic in

distress. We may be permitted to think that he has rather overacted his

part. English peers, after all, are English gentlemen; and no English

gentleman would deliberately sanction the torrent of calumny and insult

which the "Times" has poured upon this nation. There are penalties for

common offenders: there are none for those who scatter firebrands among

nations. But the "Times" will not come off unscathed. It must veer with

victory. And its readers will be not only prejudiced, but idiotic, if it

does not in the process leave the last remnant of its authority behind.

Two things will suffice to mark the real political position of the

"Times." You saw that a personal controversy was going on the other day

between its editor and Mr. Cobden. That controversy arose out of a

speech made by Mr. Bright, obliquely impugning the aristocratic law of

inheritance, which is fast accumulating the land of England in a few

hands, and disinheriting the English people of the English soil. For

this offence Mr. Bright was assailed by the "Times" with calumnies so

outrageous that Mr. Cobden could not help springing forward to vindicate

his friend. The institution which the "Times" so fiercely defended on

this occasion against a look which threatened it with alteration is

vital and sacred in the eyes of the aristocracy, but is not vital or

sacred in the eyes of the whole English nation. Again, the "Times" hates

Garibaldi; and its hatred, generally half smothered, broke out in a loud

cry of exultation when the hero fell, as it hoped forever, at

Aspromonte. But the English people idolize Garibaldi, and receive him

with a burst of enthusiasm unexampled in fervor. The English people love

Garibaldi, and Garibaldi's name is equally dear to all American hearts.

Is not this--let me ask in passing--a proof that there is a bond of

sympathy, after all, between the English people and you, and that, if as

a nation we are divided from you, it is not by a radical estrangement,

but by some cloud of error which will in time pass away?

The wealth of the "Times," the high position which it has held since

the period when it was the great Liberal journal, the clever writing and

the early intelligence which its money and its secret connections with

public men enable it to command, give it a circulation and an influence

beyond the class whose interests it represents. But it has been thrust

from a large part of its dominion by the cheap London and local press.

It is exceeded in circulation more than twofold by the London

"Telegraph," a journal which, though it has been against the war, has, I

think, by no means shown in its leading articles the same spirit of

hostility to the American people. The London "Star," which is strongly

Federal, is also a journal of wide circulation. The "Daily News" is a

high-priced paper, circulating among the same class as the "Times"; its

circulation is comparatively small, but it is on the increase, and the

journal, I have reason to believe, is prosperous. The Manchester

"Examiner and Times," again,--a great local paper of the North of

England,--nearly equals the London "Times" in circulation, and is

favorable to your cause. I live under the dominion of the London

"Times," and I will not deny that it is a great power of evil. It will

be a great power of evil indeed, if it succeeds in producing a fatal

estrangement between two kindred nations. But no one who knows England,

especially the northern part of England, in which Liberalism prevails,

would imagine the voice of the "Times" to be that of the English people.

Of the part taken by the writers of England it would be rash to speak in

general terms, Stuart Mill and Cairns have supported your cause as

heartily as Cobden and Bright. I am not aware that any political or

economical writer of equal eminence has taken the other side. The

leading reviews and periodicals have exhibited, as might have been

expected, very various shades of opinion; but, with the exception of the

known organs of violent Toryism, they have certainly not breathed hatred

of this nation. In those which specially represent our rising intellect,

the intellect which will probably govern us ten years hence, I should

say the preponderance of the writing had been on the Federal side. In

the University of Oxford the sympathies of the High-Church clergy and of

the young Tory gentry are with the South; but there is a good deal of

Northern sentiment among the young fellows of our more liberal colleges,

and generally in the more active minds. At the University Debating Club,

when the question between the North and the South was debated, the vote,

though I believe in a thin house, was in favor of the North. Four

Professors are members of the Union and Emancipation Society. And if

intellect generally has been somewhat coldly critical, I am not sure

that it has departed from its true function. I am conscious myself that

I may be somewhat under the dominion of my feelings, that I may be even

something of a fanatic in this matter. There may be evil as well as good

in the cause which, as the good preponderates, claims and receives the

allegiance of my heart. In that case, intellect, in pointing out the

evil, only does its duty.

One English writer has certainly raised his voice against you with

characteristic vehemence and rudeness. As an historical painter and a

humorist Carlyle has scarcely an equal: a new intellectual region seemed

to open to me when I read his "French Revolution." But his philosophy,

in its essential principle, is false. He teaches that the mass of

mankind are fools,--that the hero alone is wise,--that the hero,

therefore, is the destined master of his fellow-men, and that their only

salvation lies in blind submission to his rule,--and this without

distinction of time or circumstance, in the most advanced as well as in

the most primitive ages of the world. The hero-despot can do no wrong.

He is a king, with scarcely even a God above him; and if the moral law

happens to come into collision with his actions, so much the worse for

the moral law. On this theory, a Commonwealth such as yours ought not

to exist; and you must not be surprised, if, in a fit of spleen, the

great cynic grasps his club and knocks your cause on the head, as he

thinks, with a single blow. Here is the end of an unsound, though

brilliant theory,--a theory which had always latent in it the worship of

force and fraud, and which has now displayed its tendency at once in the

portentous defence of the robber-policy of Frederic the Great and in the

portentous defence of the Slave Power. An opposite theory of human

society is, in fact, finding its confirmation in these events,--that

which tells us that we all have need of each other, and that the goal

towards which society actually moves is not an heroic despotism, but a

real community, in which each member shall contribute his gifts and

faculties to the common store, and the common government shall become

the work of all. For, if the victory in this struggle has been won, it

has been won, not by a man, but by the nation; and that it has been won

not by a man, but by the nation, is your glory and the pledge of your

salvation. We have called for a Cromwell, and he has not come; he has

not come, partly because Cromwells are scarce, partly, perhaps, because

the personal Cromwell belonged to a different age, and the Cromwell of

this age is an intelligent, resolute, and united people.

I might mention other eccentricities of opinion quite distinct from the

general temper of the English nation, such as that of the

ultra-scientific school, which thinks it unscientific philanthropy to

ascribe the attributes of humanity to the negro,--a school some of the

more rampant absurdities of which had, just before I left England,

called down the rebuke of real science in the person of Mr. Huxley. And

I might note, if the time would allow, many fluctuations and

oscillations which have taken place among our organs of opinion as the

struggle went on. But I must say on the whole, both with reference to

our different classes and with reference to our literature, that,

considering the complexity of the case, the distance from which our

people viewed it, and the changes which it has undergone since the war

broke out, I do not think there is much room for disappointment as to

the sympathies of our people. Parties have been divided on this question

much as they are on great questions among ourselves, and much as they

were in the time of Charles I., when this long strife began. The England

of Charles and Laud has been against you: the England of Hampden,

Milton, and Cromwell has in the main been on your side.

I say there has not been much ground for disappointment: I do not say

there has been none. England at present is not in her noblest mood. She

is laboring under a reaction which extends over France and great part of

Europe, and which furnishes the key at this moment to the state of

European affairs. This movement, like all great movements, reactionary

or progressive, is complex in its nature. In the political sphere it

presents itself as the lassitude and despondency which, as usual, have

ensued after great political efforts, such as were made by the

Continental nations in the abortive revolutions of 1848, and by England

in a less degree in the struggle for Parliamentary Reform. In the

religious sphere it presents itself in an analogous shape: there,

lassitude and despondency have succeeded to the efforts of the religious

intellect to escape from the decaying creeds of the old State Churches

and push forward to a more enduring faith; and the priest as well as the

despot has for a moment resumed his sway--though not his uncontested

sway--over our weariness and our fears. The moral sentiment, after high

tension, has undergone a corresponding relaxation. All liberal measures

are for the time at a discount. The Bill for the Abolition of

Church-Rates, once carried in the House of Commons by large majorities,

is now lost. The nominal leaders of the Liberal party themselves have

let their principles fall into abeyance, and almost coalesced with their

Tory opponents. The Whig nobles who carried the Reform Bill have owned

once more the bias of their order, and become determined, though covert,

enemies of Reform. The ancient altars are sought again for the sake of

peace by fainting spirits and perplexed minds; and again, as after our

Reformation, as after our great Revolution, we see a number of

conversions to the Church of Rome. On the other hand, strange physical

superstitions, such as mesmerism and spirit-rapping, have crept, like

astrology under the Roman Empire, into the void left by religious faith.

Wealth has been pouring into England, and luxury with wealth. Our public

journals proclaim, as you may perhaps have seen, that the society of our

capital is unusually corrupt. The comic as well as the serious signs of

the reaction appear everywhere. A tone of affected cynicism pervades a

portion of our high intellect; and a pretended passion for

prize-fighting shows that men of culture are weary of civilization, and

wish to go back to barbarism for a while. The present head of the

Government in England is not only the confederate, but the counterpart,

of the head of the French Empire; and the rule of each denotes the

temporary ascendancy of the same class of motives in their respective

nations. An English Liberal is tempted to despond, when he compares the

public life of England in the time of Pym and Hampden with our public

life now. But there is greatness still in the heart of the English

nation.

And you, too, have you not known in the course of your history a

slack-tide of faith, a less aspiring hour? Have not you, too, known a

temporary ascendancy of material over spiritual interests, a lowering of

the moral tone, a readiness, for the sake of ease and peace and secure

enjoyment, to compromise with evil? Have not you, too, felt the tyranny

of wealth, putting the higher motives for a moment under its feet? What

else has brought these calamities upon you? What else bowed your necks

to the yoke which you are now breaking at so great a cost? Often and

long in the life of every nation, though the tide is still advancing,

the wave recedes. Often and long the fears of man overcome his hopes;

but in the end the hopes of man overcome his fears. Your regeneration,

when it is achieved, will set forward the regeneration of the European

nations. It is the function which all nations, which all men, in their

wavering progress towards perfection, perform in turn for each other.

This temporary lowering of the moral tone in English society has

extended to the question of Slavery. It has deadened our feelings on

that subject, though I hope without shaking our principles. You ask

whether England can have been sincere in her enmity to Slavery, when she

refuses sympathy to you in your struggle with the Slave Power.

Talleyrand, cynic as he was, knew that she was sincere, though he said

that not a man in France thought so but himself. She redeemed her own

slaves with a great price. She sacrificed her West-Indian interest. She

counts that achievement higher than her victories. She spends annually

much money and many lives and risks much enmity in her crusade against

the slave-trade. When your Southern statesmen have tried to tamper with

her, they have found her true. If they had bid us choose between a

concession to their designs and war, all aristocratic as we are, we

should have chosen war. Every Englishman who takes the Southern side is

compelled by public opinion to preface his advocacy with a disclaimer of

all sympathy with Slavery. The agent of the slave-owners in England, Mr.

Spence, pleads their cause to the English people on the ground of

gradual emancipation. Once the "Times" ventured to speak in defence of

Slavery, and the attempt was never made again. The principle, I say,

holds firm among the mass of the people; but on this, as on other moral

questions, we are not in our noblest mood.

In justice to my country, however, let me remind you that you did

not--perhaps you could not--set the issue between Freedom and Slavery

plainly before us at the outset; you did not--perhaps you could

not--set it plainly before yourselves. With the progress of the struggle

your convictions have been strengthened, and the fetters of legal

restriction have been smitten off by the hammer of war. But your rulers

began with disclaimers of Anti-Slavery designs. You cannot be surprised,

if our people took your rulers at their word, or if, notwithstanding

your change,--a change which they imagined to be wrought merely by

expediency,--they retained their first impression as to the object of

the war, an impression which the advocates of the South used every art

to perpetuate in their minds. That the opponents of Slavery in England

should desire the restoration of the Union with Slavery, and with

Slavery strengthened, as they expected it would be, by new concessions,

was what you could not reasonably expect. And remember--I say it not

with any desire to trench on American politics or to pass judgment on

American parties--that the restoration of the Union with Slavery is what

a large section of your people, and one of the candidates for your

Presidency, are in fact ready to embrace now.

Had you been able to say plainly at the outset that you were fighting

against Slavery, the English people would scarcely have given ear to the

cunning fiction of Mr. Spence. It would scarcely have been brought to

believe that this great contest was only about a Tariff. It would have

seen that the Southern planter, if he was a Free-Trader, was a

Free-Trader not from enlightenment, but because from the degradation of

labor in his dominions he had no manufactures to support; and that he

was in fact a protectionist of his only home production which feared

competition,--the home-bred slave. I have heard Mr. Spence's book called

the most successful lie in history. Very successful it certainly was,

and its influence in misleading England ought not to be overlooked. It

was written with great skill, and it came out just at the right time,

before people had formed their opinions, and when they were glad to have

a theory presented to their minds. But its success would have been

short-lived, had it not received what seemed authoritative confirmation

from the language of statesmen here.

I might mention many other things which have influenced opinion in the

wrong way: the admiration felt by our people, and, to your honor,

equally felt by you, for the valor and self-devotion which have been

shown by the Southerners, and which, when they have submitted to the

law, will entitle them to be the fellow-citizens of freemen; a careless,

but not ungenerous, sympathy for that which, by men ignorant of the

tremendous strength of a Slave Power, was taken to be the weaker side;

the doubt really, and, considering the conflict of opinion here, not

unpardonably, entertained as to the question of State Sovereignty and

the right of Secession. All these motives, though they operate against

your cause, are different from hatred of you. But there are two points

to which in justice to my country I must especially call attention.

The first is this,--that you have not yourselves been of one mind in

this matter, nor has the voice of your own people been unanimous. No

English speaker or journal has denounced the war or reviled the conduct

of your Government more bitterly than a portion of American politicians

and a section of the American press. The worst things said in England of

your statesmen, of your generals, of your armies, of your contractors,

of your social state and character as a people, have been but the echo

of things which have been said here. If the New-York correspondents of

some English journals have been virulent and calumnious, their virulence

and their calumnies have been drawn, to a great extent, from the

American circles in which they have lived. No slanders poured by English

ignorance or malevolence on American society have been so foul as those

which came from a renegade American writing in one of our Tory journals

under the name of "Manhattan." No lamentations over the subversion of

the Constitution and the destruction of personal liberty have been

louder than those of your own Opposition. The chief enemies of your

honor have been those of your own household. The crime of a great mass

of our people against you has, in fact, consisted in believing

statements about America made by men whom they knew to be Americans, and

did not know to be disloyal to the cause of their country. I have seen

your soldiers described in an extract from one of your own journals as

jail-birds, vagabonds, and foreigners. I have seen your President

accused of wishing to provoke riots in New York that he might have a

pretence for exercising military power. I have seen him accused of

sending to the front, to be thinned, a regiment which was likely to vote

against him. I have seen him accused of decoying his political opponents

into forging soldiers' votes in order to discredit them. What could the

"Times" itself say more?

The second point is this. Some of your journals did their best to

prevent our people from desiring your success by declaring that your

success would be followed by aggression on us. The drum, like strong

wine, is apt to get into weak heads, especially when they are

unaccustomed to the sound. An Englishman coming among you is soon

assured that you do not wish to attack Canada. Apart from considerations

of morality and honor, he finds every man of sense here aware that

extent of territory is your danger, if you wish to be one nation,--and

further, that freedom of development, and not procrustean

centralization, is the best thing for the New as well as for the Old

World. But the mass of our people have not been among you; nor do they

know that the hot words sedulously repeated to them by our Southern

press are not authentic expressions of your designs. They are doubly

mistaken,--mistaken both in thinking that you wish to seize Canada, and

in thinking that a division of the Union into two hostile nations, which

would compel you to keep a standing army, would render you less

dangerous to your neighbors. But your own demagogues are the authors of

the error; and the Monroe doctrine and the Ostend manifesto are still

ringing in our ears. I am an adherent of the Monroe doctrine, if it

means, as it did on the lips of Canning, that the reactionary influence

of the old European Governments is not to be allowed to mar the hopes of

man in the New World; but if it means violence, every one must be

against it who respects the rights of nations. When you contrast the

feelings of England towards you with those of other nations, Italy for

example, you must remember that Italy has no Canada. I hope Canada will

soon cease to be a cause of mistrust between us. The political dominion

of England over it, since it has had a free constitution of its own, has

dwindled to a mere thread. It is as ripe to be a nation as these

Colonies were on the eve of the American Revolution. As a dependency, it

is of no solid value to England since she has ceased to engross the

Colonial trade. It distracts her forces, and prevents her from acting

with her full weight in the affairs of her own quarter of the world. It

belongs in every sense to America, not to Europe; and its peculiar

institutions--its extended suffrage, its freedom from the hereditary

principle, its voluntary system in religion, its common schools--are

opposed to those of England, and identical with those of the neighboring

States. All this the English nation is beginning to feel; and it has

tried in the case of the Ionian Islands the policy of moderation, and

found that it raises, instead of lowering, our solid reputation and our

real power. The confederation which is now in course of formation

between the North-American Colonies tends manifestly to a further

change; it tends to a further change all the more manifestly because

such a tendency is anxiously disclaimed. Yes, Canada will soon cease to

trouble and divide us. But while it is England's, it is England's; and

to threaten her with an attack on it is to threaten a proud nation with

outrage and an assault upon its honor.

Finally, if our people have misconstrued your acts, let me conjure you

to make due allowance for our ignorance,--an ignorance which, in many

cases, is as dark as night, but which the progress of events here begins

gloriously to dispel. We are not such a nation of travellers as you are,

and scarcely one Englishman has seen America for a hundred Americans

that have seen England. "Why does not Beauregard fly to the assistance

of Lee?" said a highly educated Englishman to an American in England.

"Because," was the reply, "the distance is as great as it is from Rome

to Paris." If these three thousand miles of ocean that lie between us

could be removed for a few days, and the two great branches of the

Anglo-Saxon race could look each other in the face, and speak their

minds to each other, there would be an end, I believe, of all these

fears. When an Englishman and an American meet, in this country or in

England, they are friends, notwithstanding all that has passed; why not

the two nations?

I have not presumed, and shall not presume, to touch on any question

that has arisen or may arise between the Executive Government of my

country and the Executive Government of yours. In England, Liberals have

not failed to plead for justice to you, and, as we thought, at the same

time, for the maintenance of English honor. But I will venture to make,

in conclusion, one or two brief remarks as to the general temper in

which these questions should be viewed.

In the first place, when great and terrible issues hang upon our acts,

perhaps upon our words, let us control our fancies and distinguish

realities from fictions. There hangs over every great struggle, and

especially over every civil war, a hot and hazy atmosphere of excited

feeling which is too apt to distort all objects to the view. In the

French Revolution, men were suspected of being objects of suspicion, and

sent to the guillotine for that offence. The same feverish and delirious

fancies prevailed as to the conduct of other nations. All the most

natural effects of a violent revolution--the depreciation of the

assignats, the disturbance of trade, the consequent scarcity of

food--were ascribed by frantic rhetoricians to the guineas of Pitt,

whose very limited amount of secret-service money was quite inadequate

to the performance of such wonders. When a foreign nation has given

offence, it is turned by popular imagination into a fiend, and its

fiendish influence is traced with appalling clearness in every natural

accident that occurs. I have heard England accused of having built the

Chicago Wigwam, with the building of which she had as much to do as with

the building of the Great Pyramid. I have heard it insinuated that her

policy was governed by her share in the Confederate Cotton-Loan. The

Confederate Cotton-Loan is, I believe, four millions and a half. There

is an English nobleman whose estates are reputed to be worth a larger

sum. "She is very great," says a French writer, "that odious England."

Odious she may be, but she is great,--too great to be bribed to baseness

by a paltry fee.

In the second place, let us distinguish hostile acts, of which an

account must of course be demanded, from mere words, which great

nations, secure of their greatness, may afford to let pass. Your

President knows the virtue of silence; but silence is so little the

system on either side of the water, that in the general flux of rhetoric

some rash things are sure to be said. One of our statesmen, while

starring it in the Provinces, carelessly throws out the expression that

Jeff Davis has made the South a nation; another says that you are

fighting for Empire, and the South for Independence. Our Prime-Minister

is sometimes offensive in his personal bearing towards you,--as, to our

bitter cost, he has often been towards other nations. On the other hand,

your statesmen have said hard things of England; and one of your

ambassadors to a great Continental state published, not in his private,

but in his official capacity, language which made the Northern party in

England for a moment hang their heads with shame. A virulence,

discreditable to England, has at times broken forth in our House of

Commons,--as a virulence, not creditable to this country, has at times

broken forth in your Congress. But what has the House of Commons done?

Threatening motions were announced in favor of Recognition,--in defence

of the Confederate rams. They were all set aside by the good sense of

the House and of the nation. It ended in a solemn farce,--in the

question being put very formally to the Government whether it intended

to recognize the Confederate States, to which the Government replied

that it did not.

And when the actions of our Government are in question, fair allowance

must be made for the bad state of International Law. The very term

itself is, in fact, as matters at present stand, a dangerous fiction.

There can be no law, in a real sense, where there is no law-giver, no

tribunal, no power of giving legal effect to a sentence,--but where the

party on whose side the law is held to be must after all be left to do

himself right with the strong hand. And one consequence is that

governments are induced to rest in narrow technicalities, and to be

ruled by formal precedents, when the question ought to be decided on the

broadest grounds of right. The decision of Lord Stowell, for example,

that it is lawful for the captor to burn an enemy's vessel at sea rather

than suffer her to escape, though really applying only to a case of

special necessity, has been supposed to cover a system of burning prizes

at sea, which is opposed to the policy and sentiment of all civilized

nations, and which Lord Stowell never could have had in view. And it

must be owned that this war, unexampled in all respects, has been

fruitful of novel questions respecting belligerent rights, on which a

Government meaning no evil might easily be led astray. Among its results

we may hope that this revolution will give birth to a better system of

International Law. Would there were reason to hope that it might lead to

the erection of some high tribunal of justice among nations to supersede

forever the dreadful and uncertain ordeal of war! Has the Government of

England, in any case where your right was clear, really done you a

wrong? If it has, I trust that the English nation, temperately and

respectfully approached, as a proud nation requires to be, will surely

constrain its Government to make the reparation which becomes its honor.

But let it not be forgotten, that, in the worst of times, at the moment

of your lowest depression, England has refused to recognize the

Confederate States, or in any way to interfere in their behalf; and that

the steadiness of this refusal has driven the Confederate envoy, Mr.

Mason, to seek what he deems a more hospitable shore. The inducement of

cotton for our idle looms and our famishing people has been a strong one

to our statesmen as well as to our people, and the Tempter has been at

their side. Despotism, like Slavery, is necessarily propagandist. It

cannot bear the contagion, it cannot bear the moral rebuke, of

neighboring freedom. The new French satrapy in Mexico needs some more

congenial and some weaker neighbor than the United Republic, and we have

had more than one intimation that this need is felt.

And this suggests one closing word as to our blockade-running. Nothing

done on our side, I should think, can have been more galling, as nothing

has been so injurious to your success. For myself, in common with all

who think as I do on these questions, I abhor the blockade-runners; I

heartily wish that the curse of ill-gotten gain may rest on every piece

of gold they make; and never did I feel less proud of my country than

when, on my way hither, I saw those vessels in Halifax sheltered under

English guns. But blockade-running is the law; it is the test, in fact,

of an effective blockade. And Englishmen are the blockade-runners, not

because England as a nation is your enemy, but because her merchants are

more adventurous and her seamen more daring than those of any nation but

your own. You, I suspect, would not be the least active of

blockade-runners, if we were carrying on a blockade. The nearness of our

fortresses at Halifax and Nassau to your shores, which makes them the

haunt of blockade-runners, is not the result of malice, but of

accident,--of most unhappy accident, as I believe. We have not planted

them there for this purpose. They have come down to us among the general

inheritance of an age of conquest, when aggression was thought to be

strength and glory,--when all kings and nations were alike

rapacious,--and when the prize remained with us, not because we were

below our neighbors in morality, but because we were more resolute in

council and mightier in arms. Our conquering hour was yours. You, too,

were then English citizens. You welcomed the arms of Cromwell to

Jamaica. Your hearts thrilled at the tidings of Blenheim and Ramillies,

and exulted in the thunders of Chatham. You shared the laurels and the

conquests of Wolfe. For you and with you we overthrew France and Spain

upon this continent, and made America the land of the Anglo-Saxon

race. Halifax will share the destinies of the North-American

confederation,--destinies, as I said before, not alien to yours. Nassau

is an appendage to our West-Indian possessions. Those possessions are

and have long been, and been known to every reasoning Englishman to be,

a mere burden to us. But we have been bound in honor and humanity to

protect our emancipated slaves from a danger which lay near. An ocean of

changed thought and feeling has rolled over the memory of this nation

within the last three years. You forget that but yesterday you were the

Great Slave Power.

You, till yesterday, were the great Slave Power. And England, with all

her faults and shortcomings, was the great enemy of slavery. Therefore

the slave-owners who had gained possession of your Government hated her,

insulted her, tried to embroil you with her. They represented her, and I

trust not without truth, as restlessly conspiring against the existence

of their great institution. They labored, not in vain, to excite your

jealousy of her maritime ambition, when, in enforcing the right of

search and striving to put down the slave-trade, she was really obeying

her conscience and the conscience of mankind. They bore themselves

towards her in these controversies as they bore themselves towards

you,--as their character compels them to bear themselves towards all

whom they have to deal. Living in their own homes above law, the

proclaimed doctrines of lawless aggression which alarmed and offended

not England alone, but every civilized nation. And this, as I trust and

believe, has been the main cause of the estrangement between us, so far

as it has been an estrangement between the nations, not merely between

certain sections and classes. It is a cause which will henceforth

operate no more. A Scandinavian hero, as the Norse legend tells, waged a

terrible combat through a whole night with the dead body of his

brother-in-arms, animated by a Demon; but with the morning the Demon

fled.

Other thoughts crowd upon my mind,--thoughts of what the two nations

have been to each other in the past, thoughts of what they may yet be to

each other in the future. But these thoughts will rise in other minds as

well as in mine, if they are not stifled by the passion of the hour. If

there is any question to be settled between us, let us settle it without

disparagement to the just claims or the honor of either party, yet, if

possible, as kindred nations. For if we do not, our posterity will curse

us. A century hence, the passions which caused the quarrel will be dead,

the black record of the quarrel will survive and be detested. Do what we

will now, we shall not cancel the tie of blood, nor prevent it from

hereafter asserting its undying power. The Englishmen of this day will

not prevent those who come after them from being proud of England's

grandest achievement, the sum of all her noblest victories,--the

foundation of this the great Commonwealth of the New World. And you will

not prevent the hearts of your children's children from turning to the

birth-place of their nation, the land of their history and of their

early greatness, the land which holds the august monuments of your

ancient race, the works of your illustrious fathers, and their graves.