^3 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 ou^...J^.^...^..(jntJbiAfiu.. 
 
 Class 
 

 xf ^ 
 
 ENGLAND AND AMERICA 
 
 A LECTURE, 
 
 DELIVERED BY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH, 
 
 BEFORE THE BOSTON FRATERNITY, DURING HIS RECENT VISIT 
 TO THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 3cpn ttU& from tfje " Atlantic 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 ADDRESSED, BY THE AUTHOR, TO THE 
 
 .PRESIDENT OF THE UNION AND EMANCIPATION SOCIETY, 
 MANCHESTER. 
 
 MANCHESTER : 
 
 A. IRELAND AND CO., PALL t MALL COURT. 
 1865. 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA: 
 
 A LECTURE, 
 
 DELIVERED BY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH, 
 
 ti 
 
 BEFORE THE BOSTON FRATERNITY, DURING HIS RECENT VISIT 
 TO THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 ADDRESSED, BY THE AUTHOR, TO THE 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE UNION AND EMANCIPATION SOCIETY, 
 MANCHESTER. , ; *. 
 
 MANCHESTER : 
 A. IRELAND AND CO., PALL MALL COURT. 
 
 1865. 
 
.a 
 
OXFORD, January 16, 1865. 
 
 - Mr DEAR SIR, 
 
 The lecture delivered before the Boston Fraternity, 
 and published in the Atlantic Monthly, which you propose to 
 reprint, and which I shall be most happy to see circulated 
 under your auspices, is obviously the work of one who does 
 not regard America as a foreign nation, alien to our political 
 concerns, but as the great colony of England, accidentally and 
 temporarily estranged from the mother country by the acts of 
 George III., Mr. Grenville, and Lord North acts against which 
 Chatham protested and in which the English people had no 
 share. This view, and the sentiments which correspond to it, 
 may be erroneous, but they involve no want of loyalty or 
 affection to our own country. 
 
 There are two lines of policy which may be pursued towards 
 the great Anglo-Saxon community on the other side of the 
 Atlantic. One is to treat it as a natural enemy, and do all 
 in our power to break it up and destroy its greatness. The 
 other is to treat it as our natural friend, to show on every 
 proper occasion and in every way consistent with our honour 
 
 225806 
 
iv. 
 
 (that honour without which there can be no worthy friendship 
 on either side), that we are sensible of the tie of blood which 
 unites us to it, and to divest American greatness of danger to 
 us by making it our own. The present current of events seems 
 to show that the line of policy last mentioned, though rejected 
 by great diplomatists, is likely to prove the more practicable 
 as well as the more genial of the two. In fact, their geo 
 graphical position, the great channels of commerce, such as the 
 Mississippi and other navigable rivers, which traverse their 
 territory, and mutual interests too manifest to be disregarded, 
 added to their common race and language, can scarcely fail to 
 reunite the inhabitants of Northern America, in the lon run 
 
 > Q 
 
 into one confederation, even though a temporary disruption 
 should take place. No State has been more loyal to the 
 Federal Government during this rebellion, or shown its loyalty 
 in a more effective way, than California; and the separation 
 of the West from the East, so confidently predicted here, 
 seems to observers on the spot improbable in the highest 
 degree. 
 
 The two portions of the Anglo-Saxon race have now been 
 brought pretty close to the verge of a fratricidal war for a 
 fratricidal war it would be, in the literal sense, not perhaps to 
 our aristocracy, but to that very numerous class of our people 
 which has kinsmen on the other side of the Atlantic. Our 
 French rivals, I see, are beginning to reckon upon this war as 
 
V. 
 
 certain to ensue, and to exult in the prospect of it. And 
 French imperialists well may exult; for it would be the 
 greatest blow that the cause of human freedom could possibly 
 
 receive. 
 
 The influences which impel us towards this disaster on both 
 sides are too powerful : but on both sides they are alien not 
 only to the interests, but to the deepest feelings of the great 
 body of the people, and such as true patriots, actuated not 
 by love or hatred of any class or order, but by desire of the 
 general welfare, ought to struggle, and may yet successfully 
 struggle, to control. 
 
 On our side there is the antipathy of our aristocracy and 
 hierarchy, the feudal and Koman elements of our polity, to 
 the free institutions of New England an antipathy so natural, 
 so inevitable, that it ought to move no resentment, unless it 
 breaks out into injurious acts, and sacrifices the public welfare 
 to the interests of a particular order. The slaveowning aristo 
 cracy, oppressors of a helpless race, torturers of women, authors 
 of a slave code which sets Christian sanctity as well as justice 
 at defiance, would scarcely have received the sympathy of St. 
 Louis, Bayard, or the Black Prince, much less that of the 
 good bishops of the Middle Ages. The pedigrees of a great 
 many of them are not more historic than those of overseers or 
 sharp Yankee traders. Still they are an aristocracy of a certain 
 kind ; at all events the government which they are struggling 
 
VI. 
 
 to overthrow is a government of the people. Besides this class 
 antagonism, there is the danger arising from the unpatriotic 
 cupidity of some of our commercial men, fitters out of priva 
 teers for the South, and blockade runners, for whose gains, the 
 nation, though it has no share in them, may pay in tears and 
 blood. 
 
 Every Anglo-American has at the bottom of his heart some 
 thing of a filial feeling towards Old England. But the Irish, 
 in America, are, with too much reason, our mortal enemies ; and 
 as they vote together with clanish compactness, they are able to 
 exercise a very disproportionate influence on the councils of the 
 State and the conduct of public men. The slaveowners hated 
 us with equal malignity, though we are now exhorted to take; 
 them to our bosom ; and the Democratic party, of which they 
 were the chiefs, and the Irish the rank and file, during its long 
 domination, succeeded in creating a factitious Anglophobia, in 
 which almost all politicians and public writers, more or less, 
 shared or pretended to share, and which, though its cause being- 
 withdrawn, it will probably soon subside, has not yet ceased to 
 poison the judgment of the American people. 
 
 Profligate journalists on both sides have laboured to inflame 
 the mutual animosity; and if the result should be a war, per 
 haps the world will begin to moralize upon the irresponsible 
 agencies which can bring such calamities on nations. Foremost 
 in virulence on our side, and perhaps unparalleled in disregard 
 
Vll. 
 
 of truth, has been the wealthiest of English journals, and 1 
 one which most affects the air of a great public instructor, abc 
 the feelings of ordinary partizanship and the passions of the 
 people. The mischief done by the leading articles has be * 
 equalled, or even exceeded, by that done by the letters of -U 
 chosen or perhaps too well chosen correspondents, who, bei 
 men incapable of observing and recording a great revolutL 
 have filled their letters with slanderous gossip, collected some 
 times in the most discreditable manner, to gratify the lowi 
 prejudices of their English readers. 
 
 The principal point of dangerous contact is Canada; the co o- 
 nists of which, or a large part of them, have been stimulated by 
 our Tory press and by the military demonstrations made by the 
 government on their frontier, into an attitude of irritating 
 hostility to their neighbours : whence the gathering of Southern 
 refugees and emissaries in that territory, the Raids, and the 
 notice now given by the American government of its intention 
 to place an armed flotilla on the lakes. The Americans have 
 no wish to annex Canada, the addition of which to their vast 
 territories would only increase the difficulty of securing a com 
 pact nationality, the grand object of their present wishes : bur 
 they of course appreciate it as a battle-field, and they are 
 perated at seeing it made a den of bandits and buccan-. 
 Nassau is also a great source of ill feeling; for though block 
 ade running may be lawful, it is bitter to see a distant p 
 
viii. 
 
 sheltering on your very coast, beneath the guns of an outlying 
 fortress, the vessels which sustain and prolong a civil war. 
 When all this is over, the reason of the English nation will 
 perhaps begin to reflect on the value of distant dependencies, 
 which cost us a good deal, yield us nothing, and entangle us in 
 quarrels. 
 
 The effects of war to the Americans will be the ruin of their 
 finances, which the inexperience of their financiers has already 
 brought into a most critical condition ; and which can be restored 
 only by the^ revival of their trade, the opening up of their 
 internal communications, and the influx of emigrants to con 
 vert, by their labour, the dormant resources of the country 
 agricultural and mineral into actual and taxable wealth. As 
 a consequence of financial ruin, and of the prolongation of mili 
 tary government, the constitution will assuredly be brought into 
 serious peril. Canada might be partly overrun : but the 
 Canadians would be thereby made the deadly enemies of 
 the United States, and the ready instruments of foreign aggres 
 sion for a century to come. 
 
 As to this country, our literary incendiaries are beginning 
 themselves to see the gravity of the position into which they 
 have brought us. Our commerce would be swept from the sea, 
 as that of the Americans has already been. The American 
 navy now numbers about five hundred vessels, of which a large 
 proportion, built in the first instance against the blockade- 
 
IX. 
 
 nmners, are equally adapted for preying on peaceful trade. 
 The scene of war would be Canada, three thousand miles from 
 our resources, almost inaccessible during five months in the 
 year, and commanded by great lakes on which the Americans 
 can in a very short time put an overwhelming force ; while 
 the Canadians are destitute of any effective armament, and 
 would be compelled to throw themselves entirely on our hands. 
 It is a common notion in this country that we could bombard 
 the great cities on the American seaboard : but seamen say 
 and anyone who has seen the approaches to New York and 
 Boston will readily believe, that this notion is quite unfounded. 
 A blockade of so extensive a coast, with its ports full of vessels 
 of war, must be allowed to be utterly hopeless. 
 
 The Canadians have already been warned of their fate by 
 the withdrawal of the troops, which were totally inadequate to 
 guard the whole frontier, into the fortresses of the Lower 
 Province ; an intimation that, in the event of a war, the Upper 
 Province is to be abandoned to the invader. 
 
 Such would be the immediate effects to all parties of a war 
 between England and America. But the immediate effects 
 would be as nothing compared with its ultimate effects in 
 marring the glorious future of the Anglo-Saxon race, and 
 imperilling the principles of which the members of that race 
 are now almost the sole depositories in the world. Against 
 the currents which are drawing us towards this abyss, the pen 
 

 of a private writer is as a straw against the rapids of Niagara; 
 out much may be done by combined action, and not a little 
 =ias been clone and it is to be hoped may still be done by 
 lie association of which you are the head. 
 
 I am, my dear sir, 
 
 Very faithfully yours, 
 
 GOLD WIN SMITI 
 
 TJie President of the Manchester Union and 
 Emancipation Society, Manchester. 
 
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 dis 
 putes, 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 exas 
 perated 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 anti 
 cipate wrong. In our war with Kussia 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 ter 
 ritories. 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 satis 
 faction, when frankly tendered, which renders the reparation of an 
 unintentional offence easy and painless between men of honour. 
 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 amuse 
 ment of their countrymen, sometimes showed themselves a little 
 wanting in regard for the laws of hospitality, as well as in pene 
 tration 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 
 
 * On referring to the Blue Book I find that my memory has somewhat deceived 
 me hero. Our government did not formally acknowledge that its envoy had com 
 mitted a fault; and it is doubtful whether, legally speaking, he had committed one, 
 the question turning on the relations hetween municipal and international law. 
 But Lord Clarendon wrote a despatch (July 16, 1855), frankly expressing regret if 
 anything had been done amiss, and giving full assurance for the future, which was 
 transmitted by Mr. Buchanan to the American government " with much satisfac 
 tion," and which ought to have terminated the affair. The controversy was renewed 
 by Mr. Marcy (September 5, 1855) in the most offensive tone, and with an object 
 which it is impossible to mistake. G. S. 
 
nwelcome, even in quarters where the love of American institu- 
 
 ons least prevailed. I will venture to repeat some words from a 
 
 jcture addressed a short time before this war to the University of 
 
 xford, which at that time had amongst its students an English 
 
 )rince. "The loss of the American colonies/ said the lecturer, 
 
 peaking of your first revolution, "was perhaps in itself a gain to 
 
 oth countries. It was a gain, as it emancipated commerce and 
 
 ave free course to those reciprocal streams of wealth which a 
 
 estrictive policy had forbidden to flow. It was a gain, as it put 
 
 ,n end to an obsolete tutelage, which tended to prevent America 
 
 rom learning betimes to walk alone, while it gave England the 
 
 juerile and somewhat dangerous pleasure of reigning over those 
 
 vhom she did not and could not govern, but whom she was tempted 
 
 ,o 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 
 
 it the price of undertaking their defence. The inauguration of 
 
 :ree-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 honour, 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 diplo 
 matic 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 Arne n tfivea do thej 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 labour 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 tremen 
 dous work of re-construction? But the interests of the great com 
 munity of nations are above the private interests of America or of 
 England. If war were to breakout 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 Right, the Habeas Corpus Act, 
 the Libel Act. Perhaps you have not even yet taken from us all 1 
 that, if a kindly feeling continues between us, you may find it 
 desirable to take. England by her eight centuries of constitu 
 tional 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 institu 
 tions, not even of yours. This vast electioneering apparatus, with 
 
6 
 
 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 crown 
 ing 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 millen 
 nium. 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 wealths 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 it is because you are Englishmen 
 that English freedom, not French or Spanish despotism, is the law 
 of this continent. 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 was the English He volution 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 
 nil 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 Kevolution. 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 
 arid 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 back- 
 slidings, 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 
 B 
 
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 over 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, 
 
9 
 
 moving westward in i<he track of the ruritan 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 re-illumine 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 revolu 
 tionary 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 conquerer 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 pre 
 cipitated 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 condi 
 tions, 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 
 
10 
 
 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 sympathise 
 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 honourable or more 
 violent members of their order. With all their class-sentiments, 
 they are Englishmen, trained to walk in the paths of English 
 
11 
 
 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 Aristo 
 cratic 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 revo 
 lutionary 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 the aristo 
 cracies 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 
 
12 
 
 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 u 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 institu 
 tions as the condemnation of our own. They did this too in 
 discriminately 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 labourer should be docile and contented, that 
 popular education should not be carried dangerously high, and 
 that the right relations between capital and labour should be 
 
13 
 
 maintained. The bold doctrines of the slaveowner as to "free labour 
 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 under 
 lies all class divisions, which, in our onward progress towards the 
 attainment of a real community, will survive all class distinctions 
 and terminate the conflict between capital and labour, not by 
 making the labourer the slave of the capitalist, nor the capitalist 
 the slave of the labourer, 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 Eng 
 land 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 in 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 landowners would not suffer, but gain, by the war ; for their 
 rents would be raised by the exclusion of your corn, and the price 
 of labour would be lowered by the stoppage of emigration. The 
 suffering would fall, as usual, on the people. 
 
14 
 
 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 com 
 plete assurance of the future. 
 
 I have spoken of our commercial aristocracy generally. Liver 
 pool demands a 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 honour 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 con 
 nected 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 
 slaveowner, regardless of the honour 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 
 
15 
 
 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 assump 
 tion. 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 1 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 mani 
 fest 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 murmer to 
 the new. You share the fate of all innovators : your innovations 
 are not received with favour 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 
 
10 
 
 schools of its own ; consequently, it does not think deeply on poli 
 tical 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. Its fibres extend beyond the soil of Eng 
 land, 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 inde 
 pendence and servility. Iti 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 Nonconformity prevails ; 
 and the free churches of our Nonconformists are united by a strong 
 bond of sympathy with the churches under the voluntary system 
 here. They are perfectly staunch 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 Nonconformist 
 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 goodwill 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 
 
17 
 
 broken down. I believed as fully as anyone, 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 --f or 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 main 
 tain 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 
 t remote. They were not wrong in thinking it far more remote 
 han you did. Years of struggle, of fear, of agony, of desolated 
 tomes, have passed since your statesmen declared that a few 
 lonths would bring the rebellion to an end. In justice to our 
 eople, put the question to yourselves, if at the outset the veil 
 fhich hid the future could have been withdrawn, and the conflict 
 finch really awaited you, with all its vicissitudes, its disasters, its 
 
18 
 
 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 labour 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 favour of your cause. Early in the contest they filled to over 
 flowing Exeter Hall, the largest place of meeting in London. I 
 was present at another immense meeting of them, held by their 
 
 * The American audience, to whom these words were addressed, responded with 
 a loud and unanimous Yes! G. S. 
 
19 
 
 trades unions in London, Avhere 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 
 
20 
 
 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, it 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 com 
 bined. 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 t\i\^imes, 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 sqmreT} 
 
 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 jour 
 nalism was not only anonymous, but impersonal. The journalist 
 wore the mask not only to those whom he criticised, 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 
 
21 
 
 of his predecessors, he has come forth m 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 hi 
 rather a startling mariner, 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 potentaj^s happen, like the aristocracy, to be unfriendly to 
 your cause. (Caressed by peers and millionaires, the editor of the 
 Times could hardly fail to express the feelings of peers and million 
 aires towards a republic in distress^) We may be permitted to 
 think that he has rather overacted ms 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. (jBut the Times will not come off unscathed. It- 
 must veer with victory. And its readers will be not only pre 
 judiced, 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 
 oth er day between its editor and Mr. Cobdcn That controversy arose 
 out of a speech made by Mr. Bright, obliquely impugning the aristo 
 cratic 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 
 kelp springing forward to vindicate his friend. The institution 
 which the limes 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 for ever, at Aspromonte. 
 But the English people idolise Garibaldi, and receive him with a 
 burst of enthusiasm unexampled in fervour. The English people 
 love Garibaldi, and Garibaldi s name is equally dear to all American 
 
22 
 
 liearts. 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 
 favourable 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 
 
23 
 
 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 favour 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 humourist 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 submis 
 sion to his rule and this without distinction of time or circum 
 stance, 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 
 
24 
 
 tendency at once in the portentous defence of the robber-policy of 
 Frederick 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 Crom wells 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 
 
25 
 
 noblest mood. She is labouring unJor a reaction whieh extends 
 over France and great part of Europe, and which furnishes the 
 key at this moment to the state of European affairs. This move 
 ment, 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 if 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 civilisation, and 
 wish to go back to barbarism for a while. The present head of 
 
26 
 
 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 Hampdeii 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 Euro 
 pean 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 prin 
 ciples. 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 achieve 
 ment 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 
 
27 
 
 we are, we should have chosen war. Every Englishman wuu I.-IKUK 
 the Southern side is compelled by public opinion to preface his 
 advocacy with a disclaimer of all sympathy with Slavery. The 
 agent of the slaveowners 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 judg 
 ment on American parties that the restoration of the Union with 
 Slavery is what a large section of your people, and one of the can 
 didates 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 labour in his dominions he had 
 no manufactures to support ; and that he was in fact a protectionist 
 
28 
 
 of his only home production which feared competition the home 
 bred slave. I have heard the Tariff Theory called the most suc 
 cessful lie in history. Very successful it certainly was, and its 
 influence in misleading England ought not to be overlooked. It 
 was propounded 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 honour, equally felt by you, for the valour 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 nnpardonably, enter 
 tained 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 honour 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 gaol-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 honour, 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 develop 
 ment, 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 neighbours. 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 revolu 
 tion. 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 neighbouring 
 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 honour. 
 
 Finally, if our people have misconstrued your acts, let me con 
 jure 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," 
 
31 
 
 was the reply, "the distance is as great as it is from Rome 
 to Paris." If those 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 govern 
 ment of my country and the executive government of yours. In 
 England, English Liberals have not failed to plead for justice to 
 you, and, as we thought, at the same time, for the maintenance of 
 English honour. 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 atmo 
 sphere 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 revolu 
 tionthe depreciation of the assignats, the disturbance of trade, 
 the consequent scarcity of food were ascribed by frantic rhetori 
 cians 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 * 
 
 * English readers may perhaps require to be informed that the Chicago Wigwam 
 was the great booth at Chicago in which the opponents of Mr. Lincoln met to 
 s their "platform," and to chose their candidate for the Presidency 
 
32 
 
 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 in 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 states 
 men, 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 indepen 
 dence. 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 conti 
 nental 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 Eng 
 land, 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 favour 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 
 f arc e in the question being put very formally to the government 
 whether it intended to recognise 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 dan 
 gerous fiction. There can be no law, in a real sense, where there 
 
33 
 
 is no lawgiver, 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 for ever the dreadful and un 
 certain 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 honour. 
 But let it not be forgotten that, in the worst of times, at the 
 moment of your lowest depression, England has refused to recog 
 nise the Confederate States, or in any way to interfere in their 
 behalf; and that the steadiness of this refusal has driven the Con 
 federate 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. Des 
 potism, like Slavery, is necessarily propagandist. It cannot bear 
 the contagion, it cannot bear the moral rebuke of neighbouring 
 freedom. The new French satrapy in Mexico needs some more, 
 congenial and some weaker neighbour than the United Republic 
 and we have had more than one intimation that this need is felt. 
 
34, 
 
 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 
 11-gotten gain may rest on every piece of gold they make; and 
 lever 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 acci 
 dent as I believe. We have not planted them there for this 
 purpose. They have come down to us among the general inheri 
 tance of an age of conquest, when aggression was thought to be 
 strength and glory when all kings and nations were alike rapa 
 ciousand when the prize remained with us, not because we were 
 below our neighbours 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 Ramilies, 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 confedera 
 tion 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 English 
 man to be, a mere burden to us. But we have been bound in 
 honour and humanity to protect our emancipated slaves from a 
 danger which lay near. An ocean of changed thought and feeling 
 
35 ,/V-J 
 
 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 laboured, riot 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 with whom 
 they have to deal. Living in their own homes above law, they 
 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 estrange 
 ment 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 honour 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 birthplace 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. 
 
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