In the lower middle class religious Non-Conformity prevails; and the Free Churches of our Non-Conformists are united by a strong bond of sympathy with the Churches under the voluntary system here. They are perfectly stanch on the subject of Slavery, and so far as this war has been a struggle against that institution, it may, I think, be confidently said that the hearts of this great section of our people have been upon your side. Our Non-Conformist ministers came forward, as you are aware, in large numbers, to join with the ministers of Protestant Churches on the Continent in an Anti-Slavery address to your Government and people.
And as to the middle classes generally, upper or lower, I see no reason to think that they are wanting in good-will to this country, much less that they desire that any calamity should befall it. The journals which I take to be the chief organs of the upper middle class, if they have not been friendly, have been hostile not so much to the American people as to the war. And in justice to all classes of Englishmen, it must be remembered that hatred of the war is not hatred ofthe American people. No one hated the war at its commencement more heartily than I did. I hated it more heartily than ever after Bull Run, when, by the accounts which reached England, the character of this nation seemed to have completely broken down. I believed as fully as any one, that the task which you had undertaken was hopeless, and that you were rushing on your ruin. I dreaded the effect on your Constitution, fearing, as others did, that civil war would bring you to anarchy, and anarchy to military despotism. All historical precedents conspired to lead me to this belief. I did not know—for there was no example to teach me—the power of a really united people, the adamantine strength of institutions which were truly free. Watching the course of events with an open mind, and a deep interest, such as men at a distance can seldom be brought to feel, in the fortunes of this country, I soon revised my opinion. Yet, many times I desponded, and wished with all my heart that you would save the Border States, if you could, and let the rest go. Numbers of Englishmen,—Englishmen of all classes and parties,—who thought as I did at the outset, remain rooted in this opinion. They still sincerely believe that this is a hopeless war, which can lead to nothing but waste of blood, subversion of your laws and liberties, and the destruction of your own prosperity and that of the nations whose interests are bound up with yours. This belief they maintain with as little of ill-feeling towards you as men can have towards those who obstinately disregard their advice. And, after all, though you may have found the wisest as well as the bravest counsellors in your own hearts, he need not be your enemy who somewhat timidly counsels you against civil war. Civil war is a terrible thing,—terrible in the passions which it kindles, as well as in the blood which it sheds,—terrible in its present effects, and terrible in those which it leaves behind. It can be justified only by the complete victory of the good cause. And Englishmen, at the commencement of this civil war, if they were wrong in thinking the victory of the good cause hopeless, were not wrong in thinking it remote. They were not wrong in thinking it far more remote than you did. Years of struggle, of fear, of agony, of desolated homes, have passed since your statesmen declared that a few months would bring the Rebellion to an end. In justice to our people, put the question to yourselves,—if at the outset the veil which hid the future could have been withdrawn, and the conflict which really awaited you, with all its vicissitudes, its disasters, its dangers, its sacrifices, could have been revealed to your view, would you have gone into the war? To us, looking with anxious, but less impassioned eyes, the veil was half withdrawn, and we shrank back from the prospect which was revealed. It was well for the world, perhaps, that you were blind; but it was pardonable in us to see.
We now come to the working-men of England, the main body of our people, whose sympathy you would not the less prize, and whom you would not the less shrink from assailing without a cause, because at present the greater part of them are without political power,—at least of a direct kind. I will not speak of the opinions of our peasantry, for they have none. Their thoughts are never turned to a political question. They never read a newspaper. They are absorbed in the struggle for daily bread, of which they have barely enough for themselves and their children. Their condition, in spite of all the benevolent effort that is abroad among us, is the great blot of our social system. Perhaps, if the relation between the two countries remains kindly, the door of hope may be opened to them here; and hands now folded helplessly in English poor-houses may joyfully reap the harvests of Iowa and Wisconsin. Assuredly, they bear you no ill-will. If they could comprehend the meaning of this struggle, their hearts as well as their interests would be upon your side. But it is notin them, it is in the working-men of our cities, that the intelligence of the class resides. And the sympathy of the working-men of our cities, from the moment when the great issue between Free Labor and Slavery was fairly set before them, has been shown in no doubtful form. They have followed your wavering fortunes with eyes almost as keen and hearts almost as anxious as your own. They have thronged the meetings held by the Union and Emancipation Societies of London and Manchester to protest before the nation in favor of your cause. Early in the contest they filled to overflowing Exeter Hall, the largest place of meeting in London. I was present at another immense meeting of them, held by their Trades Unions in London, where they were addressed by Mr. Bright; and had you witnessed the intelligence and enthusiasm with which they followed the exposition of your case by their great orator, you would have known that you were not without sympathy in England,—not without sympathy such as those who look rather to the worth of a friend than to his rank may most dearly prize. Again I was present at a great meeting called in the Free-Trade Hall at Manchester to protest against the attacks upon your commerce, and saw the same enthusiasm displayed by the working-men of the North. But Mr. Ward Beecher must have brought back with him abundant assurance of the feelings of our working-men. Our opponents have tried to rival us in these demonstrations. They have tried with great resources of personal influence and wealth. But, in spite of their personal influence and the distress caused by the cotton famine, they have on the whole signally failed. Their consolation has been to call the friends of the Federal cause obscurities and nobodies. And true it is that the friends of the Federal cause are obscurities and nobodies. They are the untitled and undistinguished mass of the English people.
The leaders of our working-men, the popular chiefs of the day, the men who represent the feelings and interests of the masses, and whose names are received with ringing cheers wherever the masses are assembled, are Cobden and Bright. And Cobden and Bright have not left you in doubt of the fact that they and all they represent are on your side.
I need not say,—for you have shown that you know it well,—that, as regards the working-men of our cotton-factories, this sympathy was an offering to your cause as costly as it was sincere. Your civil war paralyzed their industry, brought ruin into their houses, deprived them and their families not only of bread, but, so far as their vision extended, of the hope of bread. Yet they have not wavered in their allegiance to the Right. Your slave-owning aristocracy had made up their minds that chivalry was confined to aristocracies, and that over the vulgar souls of the common people Cotton must be King. The working-man of Manchester, though he lives not like a Southern gentleman by the sweat of another's brow, but like a plebeian by the sweat of his own, has shown that chivalry is not confined to aristocracies, and that even over vulgar souls Cotton is not always King. I heard one of your statesmen the other day, after speaking indignantly of those who had fitted out the Alabama, pray God to bless the working-men of England. Our nation, like yours, is not a single body animated by the same political sentiments, but a mixed mass of contending interests and parties. Beware how you fire into that mass, or your shot may strike a friend.
When England in the mass is spoken of as your enemy on this occasion, the London "Times" is taken for the voice of the country. The "Times" was in former days a great popular organ. It led vehemently and even violently the struggle for Parliamentary Reform. In that way it made its fortune; and having made its fortune, it takes part with the rich. Its proprietor in those days was a man with many faults, but he was a man of the people. Aristocratic society disliked and excluded him; helived at war with it to the end. Affronted by the Whigs, he became in a certain sense a Tory; but he united his Toryism with Chartism, and was sent to Parliament for Nottingham by Tories and Chartists combined. The opposition of his journal to our New Poor-Law evinced, though in a perverse way, his feeling for the people. But his heir, the present proprietor, was born in the purple. He is a wealthy landed gentleman. He sits in Parliament for a constituency of landlords. He is thought to have been marked out for a peerage. It is accusing him of no crime to suppose, that, so far as he controls the "Times," it takes the bias of his class, and that its voice, if it speaks his sentiments, is not that of the English people, but of a rich conservative squire.
The editor is distinct from the proprietor, but his connections are perhaps still more aristocratic. A good deal has been said among us of late about his position. Before his time our journalism was not only anonymous, but impersonal. The journalist wore the mask not only to those whom he criticized, but to all the world. The present editor of the "Times" wears the mask to the objects of his criticism, but drops it, as has been remarked in Parliament, in "the gilded saloons" of rank and power. Not content to remain in the privacy which protected the independence of his predecessors, he has come forth in his own person to receive the homage of the great world. That homage has been paid in no stinted measure, and, as the British public has been apprised in rather a startling manner, with a somewhat intoxicating effect. The lords of the Money Power, the thrones and dominions of Usury, have shown themselves as assiduous as ministers and peers; and these potentates happen, like the aristocracy, to be unfriendly to your cause. Caressed by peers and millionnaires, the editor of the "Times" could hardly fail to express the feelings of peers and millionnaires towards a Republic in distress. We may be permitted to think that he has rather overacted his part. English peers, after all, are English gentlemen; and no English gentleman would deliberately sanction the torrent of calumny and insult which the "Times" has poured upon this nation. There are penalties for common offenders: there are none for those who scatter firebrands among nations. But the "Times" will not come off unscathed. It must veer with victory. And its readers will be not only prejudiced, but idiotic, if it does not in the process leave the last remnant of its authority behind.
Two things will suffice to mark the real political position of the "Times." You saw that a personal controversy was going on the other day between its editor and Mr. Cobden. That controversy arose out of a speech made by Mr. Bright, obliquely impugning the aristocratic law of inheritance, which is fast accumulating the land of England in a few hands, and disinheriting the English people of the English soil. For this offence Mr. Bright was assailed by the "Times" with calumnies so outrageous that Mr. Cobden could not help springing forward to vindicate his friend. The institution which the "Times" so fiercely defended on this occasion against a look which threatened it with alteration is vital and sacred in the eyes of the aristocracy, but is not vital or sacred in the eyes of the whole English nation. Again, the "Times" hates Garibaldi; and its hatred, generally half smothered, broke out in a loud cry of exultation when the hero fell, as it hoped forever, at Aspromonte. But the English people idolize Garibaldi, and receive him with a burst of enthusiasm unexampled in fervor. The English people love Garibaldi, and Garibaldi's name is equally dear to all American hearts. Is not this—let me ask in passing—a proof that there is a bond of sympathy, after all, between the English people and you, and that, if as a nation we are divided from you, it is not by a radical estrangement, but by some cloud of error which will in time pass away?
The wealth of the "Times," the highposition which it has held since the period when it was the great Liberal journal, the clever writing and the early intelligence which its money and its secret connections with public men enable it to command, give it a circulation and an influence beyond the class whose interests it represents. But it has been thrust from a large part of its dominion by the cheap London and local press. It is exceeded in circulation more than twofold by the London "Telegraph," a journal which, though it has been against the war, has, I think, by no means shown in its leading articles the same spirit of hostility to the American people. The London "Star," which is strongly Federal, is also a journal of wide circulation. The "Daily News" is a high-priced paper, circulating among the same class as the "Times"; its circulation is comparatively small, but it is on the increase, and the journal, I have reason to believe, is prosperous. The Manchester "Examiner and Times," again,—a great local paper of the North of England,—nearly equals the London "Times" in circulation, and is favorable to your cause. I live under the dominion of the London "Times," and I will not deny that it is a great power of evil. It will be a great power of evil indeed, if it succeeds in producing a fatal estrangement between two kindred nations. But no one who knows England, especially the northern part of England, in which Liberalism prevails, would imagine the voice of the "Times" to be that of the English people.
Of the part taken by the writers of England it would be rash to speak in general terms, Stuart Mill and Cairns have supported your cause as heartily as Cobden and Bright. I am not aware that any political or economical writer of equal eminence has taken the other side. The leading reviews and periodicals have exhibited, as might have been expected, very various shades of opinion; but, with the exception of the known organs of violent Toryism, they have certainly not breathed hatred of this nation. In those which specially represent our rising intellect, the intellect which will probably govern us ten years hence, I should say the preponderance of the writing had been on the Federal side. In the University of Oxford the sympathies of the High-Church clergy and of the young Tory gentry are with the South; but there is a good deal of Northern sentiment among the young fellows of our more liberal colleges, and generally in the more active minds. At the University Debating Club, when the question between the North and the South was debated, the vote, though I believe in a thin house, was in favor of the North. Four Professors are members of the Union and Emancipation Society. And if intellect generally has been somewhat coldly critical, I am not sure that it has departed from its true function. I am conscious myself that I may be somewhat under the dominion of my feelings, that I may be even something of a fanatic in this matter. There may be evil as well as good in the cause which, as the good preponderates, claims and receives the allegiance of my heart. In that case, intellect, in pointing out the evil, only does its duty.
One English writer has certainly raised his voice against you with characteristic vehemence and rudeness. As an historical painter and a humorist Carlyle has scarcely an equal: a new intellectual region seemed to open to me when I read his "French Revolution." But his philosophy, in its essential principle, is false. He teaches that the mass of mankind are fools,—that the hero alone is wise,—that the hero, therefore, is the destined master of his fellow-men, and that their only salvation lies in blind submission to his rule,—and this without distinction of time or circumstance, in the most advanced as well as in the most primitive ages of the world. The hero-despot can do no wrong. He is a king, with scarcely even a God above him; and if the moral law happens to come into collision with his actions, so much the worse for the moral law. On this theory,a Commonwealth such as yours ought not to exist; and you must not be surprised, if, in a fit of spleen, the great cynic grasps his club and knocks your cause on the head, as he thinks, with a single blow. Here is the end of an unsound, though brilliant theory,—a theory which had always latent in it the worship of force and fraud, and which has now displayed its tendency at once in the portentous defence of the robber-policy of Frederic the Great and in the portentous defence of the Slave Power. An opposite theory of human society is, in fact, finding its confirmation in these events,—that which tells us that we all have need of each other, and that the goal towards which society actually moves is not an heroic despotism, but a real community, in which each member shall contribute his gifts and faculties to the common store, and the common government shall become the work of all. For, if the victory in this struggle has been won, it has been won, not by a man, but by the nation; and that it has been won not by a man, but by the nation, is your glory and the pledge of your salvation. We have called for a Cromwell, and he has not come; he has not come, partly because Cromwells are scarce, partly, perhaps, because the personal Cromwell belonged to a different age, and the Cromwell of this age is an intelligent, resolute, and united people.
I might mention other eccentricities of opinion quite distinct from the general temper of the English nation, such as that of the ultra-scientific school, which thinks it unscientific philanthropy to ascribe the attributes of humanity to the negro,—a school some of the more rampant absurdities of which had, just before I left England, called down the rebuke of real science in the person of Mr. Huxley. And I might note, if the time would allow, many fluctuations and oscillations which have taken place among our organs of opinion as the struggle went on. But I must say on the whole, both with reference to our different classes and with reference to our literature, that, considering the complexity of the case, the distance from which our people viewed it, and the changes which it has undergone since the war broke out, I do not think there is much room for disappointment as to the sympathies of our people. Parties have been divided on this question much as they are on great questions among ourselves, and much as they were in the time of Charles I., when this long strife began. The England of Charles and Laud has been against you: the England of Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell has in the main been on your side.
I say there has not been much ground for disappointment: I do not say there has been none. England at present is not in her noblest mood. She is laboring under a reaction which extends over France and great part of Europe, and which furnishes the key at this moment to the state of European affairs. This movement, like all great movements, reactionary or progressive, is complex in its nature. In the political sphere it presents itself as the lassitude and despondency which, as usual, have ensued after great political efforts, such as were made by the Continental nations in the abortive revolutions of 1848, and by England in a less degree in the struggle for Parliamentary Reform. In the religious sphere it presents itself in an analogous shape: there, lassitude and despondency have succeeded to the efforts of the religious intellect to escape from the decaying creeds of the old State Churches and push forward to a more enduring faith; and the priest as well as the despot has for a moment resumed his sway—though not his uncontested sway—over our weariness and our fears. The moral sentiment, after high tension, has undergone a corresponding relaxation. All liberal measures are for the time at a discount. The Bill for the Abolition of Church-Rates, once carried in the House of Commons by large majorities, is now lost. The nominal leaders of the Liberal party themselves have let their principles fall into abeyance, and almost coalesced with their Tory opponents. The Whig nobleswho carried the Reform Bill have owned once more the bias of their order, and become determined, though covert, enemies of Reform. The ancient altars are sought again for the sake of peace by fainting spirits and perplexed minds; and again, as after our Reformation, as after our great Revolution, we see a number of conversions to the Church of Rome. On the other hand, strange physical superstitions, such as mesmerism and spirit-rapping, have crept, like astrology under the Roman Empire, into the void left by religious faith. Wealth has been pouring into England, and luxury with wealth. Our public journals proclaim, as you may perhaps have seen, that the society of our capital is unusually corrupt. The comic as well as the serious signs of the reaction appear everywhere. A tone of affected cynicism pervades a portion of our high intellect; and a pretended passion for prize-fighting shows that men of culture are weary of civilization, and wish to go back to barbarism for a while. The present head of the Government in England is not only the confederate, but the counterpart, of the head of the French Empire; and the rule of each denotes the temporary ascendancy of the same class of motives in their respective nations. An English Liberal is tempted to despond, when he compares the public life of England in the time of Pym and Hampden with our public life now. But there is greatness still in the heart of the English nation.
And you, too, have you not known in the course of your history a slack-tide of faith, a less aspiring hour? Have not you, too, known a temporary ascendancy of material over spiritual interests, a lowering of the moral tone, a readiness, for the sake of ease and peace and secure enjoyment, to compromise with evil? Have not you, too, felt the tyranny of wealth, putting the higher motives for a moment under its feet? What else has brought these calamities upon you? What else bowed your necks to the yoke which you are now breaking at so great a cost? Often and long in the life of every nation, though the tide is still advancing, the wave recedes. Often and long the fears of man overcome his hopes; but in the end the hopes of man overcome his fears. Your regeneration, when it is achieved, will set forward the regeneration of the European nations. It is the function which all nations, which all men, in their wavering progress towards perfection, perform in turn for each other.
This temporary lowering of the moral tone in English society has extended to the question of Slavery. It has deadened our feelings on that subject, though I hope without shaking our principles. You ask whether England can have been sincere in her enmity to Slavery, when she refuses sympathy to you in your struggle with the Slave Power. Talleyrand, cynic as he was, knew that she was sincere, though he said that not a man in France thought so but himself. She redeemed her own slaves with a great price. She sacrificed her West-Indian interest. She counts that achievement higher than her victories. She spends annually much money and many lives and risks much enmity in her crusade against the slave-trade. When your Southern statesmen have tried to tamper with her, they have found her true. If they had bid us choose between a concession to their designs and war, all aristocratic as we are, we should have chosen war. Every Englishman who takes the Southern side is compelled by public opinion to preface his advocacy with a disclaimer of all sympathy with Slavery. The agent of the slave-owners in England, Mr. Spence, pleads their cause to the English people on the ground of gradual emancipation. Once the "Times" ventured to speak in defence of Slavery, and the attempt was never made again. The principle, I say, holds firm among the mass of the people; but on this, as on other moral questions, we are not in our noblest mood.
In justice to my country, however, let me remind you that you did not—perhaps you could not—set the issue between Freedom and Slavery plainly beforeus at the outset; you did not—perhaps you could not—set it plainly before yourselves. With the progress of the struggle your convictions have been strengthened, and the fetters of legal restriction have been smitten off by the hammer of war. But your rulers began with disclaimers of Anti-Slavery designs. You cannot be surprised, if our people took your rulers at their word, or if, notwithstanding your change,—a change which they imagined to be wrought merely by expediency,—they retained their first impression as to the object of the war, an impression which the advocates of the South used every art to perpetuate in their minds. That the opponents of Slavery in England should desire the restoration of the Union with Slavery, and with Slavery strengthened, as they expected it would be, by new concessions, was what you could not reasonably expect. And remember—I say it not with any desire to trench on American politics or to pass judgment on American parties—that the restoration of the Union with Slavery is what a large section of your people, and one of the candidates for your Presidency, are in fact ready to embrace now.
Had you been able to say plainly at the outset that you were fighting against Slavery, the English people would scarcely have given ear to the cunning fiction of Mr. Spence. It would scarcely have been brought to believe that this great contest was only about a Tariff. It would have seen that the Southern planter, if he was a Free-Trader, was a Free-Trader not from enlightenment, but because from the degradation of labor in his dominions he had no manufactures to support; and that he was in fact a protectionist of his only home production which feared competition,—the home-bred slave. I have heard Mr. Spence's book called the most successful lie in history. Very successful it certainly was, and its influence in misleading England ought not to be overlooked. It was written with great skill, and it came out just at the right time, before people had formed their opinions, and when they were glad to have a theory presented to their minds. But its success would have been short-lived, had it not received what seemed authoritative confirmation from the language of statesmen here.
I might mention many other things which have influenced opinion in the wrong way: the admiration felt by our people, and, to your honor, equally felt by you, for the valor and self-devotion which have been shown by the Southerners, and which, when they have submitted to the law, will entitle them to be the fellow-citizens of freemen; a careless, but not ungenerous, sympathy for that which, by men ignorant of the tremendous strength of a Slave Power, was taken to be the weaker side; the doubt really, and, considering the conflict of opinion here, not unpardonably, entertained as to the question of State Sovereignty and the right of Secession. All these motives, though they operate against your cause, are different from hatred of you. But there are two points to which in justice to my country I must especially call attention.
The first is this,—that you have not yourselves been of one mind in this matter, nor has the voice of your own people been unanimous. No English speaker or journal has denounced the war or reviled the conduct of your Government more bitterly than a portion of American politicians and a section of the American press. The worst things said in England of your statesmen, of your generals, of your armies, of your contractors, of your social state and character as a people, have been but the echo of things which have been said here. If the New-York correspondents of some English journals have been virulent and calumnious, their virulence and their calumnies have been drawn, to a great extent, from the American circles in which they have lived. No slanders poured by English ignorance or malevolence on American society have been so foul as those which came from a renegade American writing in one of our Tory journals under the name of "Manhattan." No lamentationsover the subversion of the Constitution and the destruction of personal liberty have been louder than those of your own Opposition. The chief enemies of your honor have been those of your own household. The crime of a great mass of our people against you has, in fact, consisted in believing statements about America made by men whom they knew to be Americans, and did not know to be disloyal to the cause of their country. I have seen your soldiers described in an extract from one of your own journals as jail-birds, vagabonds, and foreigners. I have seen your President accused of wishing to provoke riots in New York that he might have a pretence for exercising military power. I have seen him accused of sending to the front, to be thinned, a regiment which was likely to vote against him. I have seen him accused of decoying his political opponents into forging soldiers' votes in order to discredit them. What could the "Times" itself say more?
The second point is this. Some of your journals did their best to prevent our people from desiring your success by declaring that your success would be followed by aggression on us. The drum, like strong wine, is apt to get into weak heads, especially when they are unaccustomed to the sound. An Englishman coming among you is soon assured that you do not wish to attack Canada. Apart from considerations of morality and honor, he finds every man of sense here aware that extent of territory is your danger, if you wish to be one nation,—and further, that freedom of development, and not procrustean centralization, is the best thing for the New as well as for the Old World. But the mass of our people have not been among you; nor do they know that the hot words sedulously repeated to them by our Southern press are not authentic expressions of your designs. They are doubly mistaken,—mistaken both in thinking that you wish to seize Canada, and in thinking that a division of the Union into two hostile nations, which would compel you to keep a standing army, would render you less dangerous to your neighbors. But your own demagogues are the authors of the error; and the Monroe doctrine and the Ostend manifesto are still ringing in our ears. I am an adherent of the Monroe doctrine, if it means, as it did on the lips of Canning, that the reactionary influence of the old European Governments is not to be allowed to mar the hopes of man in the New World; but if it means violence, every one must be against it who respects the rights of nations. When you contrast the feelings of England towards you with those of other nations, Italy for example, you must remember that Italy has no Canada. I hope Canada will soon cease to be a cause of mistrust between us. The political dominion of England over it, since it has had a free constitution of its own, has dwindled to a mere thread. It is as ripe to be a nation as these Colonies were on the eve of the American Revolution. As a dependency, it is of no solid value to England since she has ceased to engross the Colonial trade. It distracts her forces, and prevents her from acting with her full weight in the affairs of her own quarter of the world. It belongs in every sense to America, not to Europe; and its peculiar institutions—its extended suffrage, its freedom from the hereditary principle, its voluntary system in religion, its common schools—are opposed to those of England, and identical with those of the neighboring States. All this the English nation is beginning to feel; and it has tried in the case of the Ionian Islands the policy of moderation, and found that it raises, instead of lowering, our solid reputation and our real power. The confederation which is now in course of formation between the North-American Colonies tends manifestly to a further change; it tends to a further change all the more manifestly because such a tendency is anxiously disclaimed. Yes, Canada will soon cease to trouble and divide us. But while it is England's, it is England's;and to threaten her with an attack on it is to threaten a proud nation with outrage and an assault upon its honor.
Finally, if our people have misconstrued your acts, let me conjure you to make due allowance for our ignorance,—an ignorance which, in many cases, is as dark as night, but which the progress of events here begins gloriously to dispel. We are not such a nation of travellers as you are, and scarcely one Englishman has seen America for a hundred Americans that have seen England. "Why does not Beauregard fly to the assistance of Lee?" said a highly educated Englishman to an American in England. "Because," was the reply, "the distance is as great as it is from Rome to Paris." If these three thousand miles of ocean that lie between us could be removed for a few days, and the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race could look each other in the face, and speak their minds to each other, there would be an end, I believe, of all these fears. When an Englishman and an American meet, in this country or in England, they are friends, notwithstanding all that has passed; why not the two nations?
I have not presumed, and shall not presume, to touch on any question that has arisen or may arise between the Executive Government of my country and the Executive Government of yours. In England, Liberals have not failed to plead for justice to you, and, as we thought, at the same time, for the maintenance of English honor. But I will venture to make, in conclusion, one or two brief remarks as to the general temper in which these questions should be viewed.
In the first place, when great and terrible issues hang upon our acts, perhaps upon our words, let us control our fancies and distinguish realities from fictions. There hangs over every great struggle, and especially over every civil war, a hot and hazy atmosphere of excited feeling which is too apt to distort all objects to the view. In the French Revolution, men were suspected of being objects of suspicion, and sent to the guillotine for that offence. The same feverish and delirious fancies prevailed as to the conduct of other nations. All the most natural effects of a violent revolution—the depreciation of the assignats, the disturbance of trade, the consequent scarcity of food—were ascribed by frantic rhetoricians to the guineas of Pitt, whose very limited amount of secret-service money was quite inadequate to the performance of such wonders. When a foreign nation has given offence, it is turned by popular imagination into a fiend, and its fiendish influence is traced with appalling clearness in every natural accident that occurs. I have heard England accused of having built the Chicago Wigwam, with the building of which she had as much to do as with the building of the Great Pyramid. I have heard it insinuated that her policy was governed by her share in the Confederate Cotton-Loan. The Confederate Cotton-Loan is, I believe, four millions and a half. There is an English nobleman whose estates are reputed to be worth a larger sum. "She is very great," says a French writer, "that odious England." Odious she may be, but she is great,—too great to be bribed to baseness by a paltry fee.
In the second place, let us distinguish hostile acts, of which an account must of course be demanded, from mere words, which great nations, secure of their greatness, may afford to let pass. Your President knows the virtue of silence; but silence is so little the system on either side of the water, that in the general flux of rhetoric some rash things are sure to be said. One of our statesmen, while starring it in the Provinces, carelessly throws out the expression that Jeff Davis has made the South a nation; another says that you are fighting for Empire, and the South for Independence. Our Prime-Minister is sometimes offensive in his personal bearing towards you,—as, to our bitter cost, he has often been towards other nations. On the other hand, your statesmen have said hard things of England;and one of your ambassadors to a great Continental state published, not in his private, but in his official capacity, language which made the Northern party in England for a moment hang their heads with shame. A virulence, discreditable to England, has at times broken forth in our House of Commons,—as a virulence, not creditable to this country, has at times broken forth in your Congress. But what has the House of Commons done? Threatening motions were announced in favor of Recognition,—in defence of the Confederate rams. They were all set aside by the good sense of the House and of the nation. It ended in a solemn farce,—in the question being put very formally to the Government whether it intended to recognize the Confederate States, to which the Government replied that it did not.
And when the actions of our Government are in question, fair allowance must be made for the bad state of International Law. The very term itself is, in fact, as matters at present stand, a dangerous fiction. There can be no law, in a real sense, where there is no law-giver, no tribunal, no power of giving legal effect to a sentence,—but where the party on whose side the law is held to be must after all be left to do himself right with the strong hand. And one consequence is that governments are induced to rest in narrow technicalities, and to be ruled by formal precedents, when the question ought to be decided on the broadest grounds of right. The decision of Lord Stowell, for example, that it is lawful for the captor to burn an enemy's vessel at sea rather than suffer her to escape, though really applying only to a case of special necessity, has been supposed to cover a system of burning prizes at sea, which is opposed to the policy and sentiment of all civilized nations, and which Lord Stowell never could have had in view. And it must be owned that this war, unexampled in all respects, has been fruitful of novel questions respecting belligerent rights, on which a Government meaning no evil might easily be led astray. Among its results we may hope that this revolution will give birth to a better system of International Law. Would there were reason to hope that it might lead to the erection of some high tribunal of justice among nations to supersede forever the dreadful and uncertain ordeal of war! Has the Government of England, in any case where your right was clear, really done you a wrong? If it has, I trust that the English nation, temperately and respectfully approached, as a proud nation requires to be, will surely constrain its Government to make the reparation which becomes its honor.
But let it not be forgotten, that, in the worst of times, at the moment of your lowest depression, England has refused to recognize the Confederate States, or in any way to interfere in their behalf; and that the steadiness of this refusal has driven the Confederate envoy, Mr. Mason, to seek what he deems a more hospitable shore. The inducement of cotton for our idle looms and our famishing people has been a strong one to our statesmen as well as to our people, and the Tempter has been at their side. Despotism, like Slavery, is necessarily propagandist. It cannot bear the contagion, it cannot bear the moral rebuke, of neighboring freedom. The new French satrapy in Mexico needs some more congenial and some weaker neighbor than the United Republic, and we have had more than one intimation that this need is felt.
And this suggests one closing word as to our blockade-running. Nothing done on our side, I should think, can have been more galling, as nothing has been so injurious to your success. For myself, in common with all who think as I do on these questions, I abhor the blockade-runners; I heartily wish that the curse of ill-gotten gain may rest on every piece of gold they make; and never did I feel less proud of my country than when, on my way hither, I saw those vessels in Halifax sheltered under English guns. But blockade-running is the law; it is the test, in fact, of an effective blockade.And Englishmen are the blockade-runners, not because England as a nation is your enemy, but because her merchants are more adventurous and her seamen more daring than those of any nation but your own. You, I suspect, would not be the least active of blockade-runners, if we were carrying on a blockade. The nearness of our fortresses at Halifax and Nassau to your shores, which makes them the haunt of blockade-runners, is not the result of malice, but of accident,—of most unhappy accident, as I believe. We have not planted them there for this purpose. They have come down to us among the general inheritance of an age of conquest, when aggression was thought to be strength and glory,—when all kings and nations were alike rapacious,—and when the prize remained with us, not because we were below our neighbors in morality, but because we were more resolute in council and mightier in arms. Our conquering hour was yours. You, too, were then English citizens. You welcomed the arms of Cromwell to Jamaica. Your hearts thrilled at the tidings of Blenheim and Ramillies, and exulted in the thunders of Chatham. You shared the laurels and the conquests of Wolfe. For you and with you we overthrew France and Spain upon this continent, and made America the land of the Anglo-Saxon race. Halifax will share the destinies of the North-American confederation,—destinies, as I said before, not alien to yours. Nassau is an appendage to our West-Indian possessions. Those possessions are and have long been, and been known to every reasoning Englishman to be, a mere burden to us. But we have been bound in honor and humanity to protect our emancipated slaves from a danger which lay near. An ocean of changed thought and feeling has rolled over the memory of this nation within the last three years. You forget that but yesterday you were the Great Slave Power.
You, till yesterday, were the great Slave Power. And England, with all her faults and shortcomings, was the great enemy of slavery. Therefore the slave-owners who had gained possession of your Government hated her, insulted her, tried to embroil you with her. They represented her, and I trust not without truth, as restlessly conspiring against the existence of their great institution. They labored, not in vain, to excite your jealousy of her maritime ambition, when, in enforcing the right of search and striving to put down the slave-trade, she was really obeying her conscience and the conscience of mankind. They bore themselves towards her in these controversies as they bore themselves towards you,—as their character compels them to bear themselves towards all whom they have to deal. Living in their own homes above law, the proclaimed doctrines of lawless aggression which alarmed and offended not England alone, but every civilized nation. And this, as I trust and believe, has been the main cause of the estrangement between us, so far as it has been an estrangement between the nations, not merely between certain sections and classes. It is a cause which will henceforth operate no more. A Scandinavian hero, as the Norse legend tells, waged a terrible combat through a whole night with the dead body of his brother-in-arms, animated by a Demon; but with the morning the Demon fled.
Other thoughts crowd upon my mind,—thoughts of what the two nations have been to each other in the past, thoughts of what they may yet be to each other in the future. But these thoughts will rise in other minds as well as in mine, if they are not stifled by the passion of the hour. If there is any question to be settled between us, let us settle it without disparagement to the just claims or the honor of either party, yet, if possible, as kindred nations. For if we do not, our posterity will curse us. A century hence, the passions which caused the quarrel will be dead, the black record of the quarrel will survive and be detested. Do what we will now, we shall not cancel the tie of blood, nor prevent it from hereafter asserting its undying power.The Englishmen of this day will not prevent those who come after them from being proud of England's grandest achievement, the sum of all her noblest victories,—the foundation of this the great Commonwealth of the New World. And you will not prevent the hearts of your children's children from turning to the birth-place of their nation, the land of their history and of their early greatness, the land which holds the august monuments of your ancient race, the works of your illustrious fathers, and their graves.
Goldwin Smith.
The great national triumph we have just achieved renders that foggy and forlorn Second Tuesday of November the most memorable day of this most memorable year of the war. Under the heavy curtain of mist that brooded low over the scene, under the sombre clouds of uncertainty that hung drizzling and oppressive above the whole land, was enacted a drama whose grandeur has not been surpassed in history. The deep significance of that event it is not easy for the mind to fathom. As the accumulating majorities for the Union came rolling in, like billows succeeding billows, heaping up the waters of victory, it was not alone the ship of state that was lifted bodily over the bar, but all her costly freight of human liberties and human hopes was upborne, and floated some leagues onward towards the fair haven of the Future.
The first uprising of the nation, when its existence was assailed, was truly a sublime spectacle. But the last uprising of the same, to confirm with cool deliberation the judgment it pronounced in its heat, is a spectacle of far higher moral sublimity. That sudden wildfire-blaze of patriotism, if it was simply a blaze, had long since had time to expire. The Red Sea we had passed through was surely sufficient to quench any light flame kindled merely in the leaves and brushwood of our national character. Instead of a brisk and easy conquest of a rash rebellion, such as seemed at first to be pretty generally anticipated, we had closed with a powerful antagonist in a struggle which was all the more terrible because it was unforeseen. The country had soon digested its hot cakes of enthusiasm, and come to the tougher article, the ostrich-diet of iron determination. If we were a race of flunkies, ample opportunities had been afforded to have our flunky-ism whipped out of us. If Jonathan was but another blustering Sir Andrew Aguecheek, he would long before have elicited laughter from the world's aristocratic dress-circle, and split the ears of the groundlings, by turning from the foe that would fight, and bellowing forth that worthy gentleman's sentiments:—"An I thought he had been valiant, and so cunning in fence, I'd have seen him damned ere I'd have challenged him!" But those who looked hopefully for this conclusion have been disappointed. Even Mr. Carlyle may now perceive that we have something more than a foul chimney burning itself out over here:—strange that a seer should thus mistake the glare of a mountain-torch! We have not made war from a mere ebullition of spite, or as an experiment, or for any base and temporary purpose; but this is a war for humanity, and for all time. That we are in deadly earnest, that the heart of the nation is in it, and that this is no effervescent and fickle heart, the momentous Tuesday stands before the world as the final proof.
True, in that day's winnowing of thenational grain, which had been some four years threshing, plenty of chaff and grit were found. The opposition to the Administration was made up of three classes. The smallest, but by far the most active class, consisted of reckless politicians,—those Northern men with Southern principles (if they have anything that can properly be called principles) who sympathize with the Rebels in arms,—who hold the interests of party to be supreme, and shrink from no acts that bid fair to advance those interests. They are the grit in the machine. The second class comprised the sheep which those bad shepherds led,—sheep with a large proportion of swine intermixed, and many a fanged and dangerous cur, as ignorant as they, doing the will of his masters,—the brutish class, without enlightenment or moral perception, goaded by prejudice, and deceived by lies so shallow and foolish that the wonder was how anybody could be duped by them. Side by side with these, and often mingling with them, was the third class, the so-called "Conservatives," whose numbers and respectability could alone have kept the warlike young Falstaff of the expedition in countenance, and induced him to march through Coventry (or rather into it, for he got no farther) with his motley crew of followers.
This last-named class, when analyzed, is found to be composed of a great variety of elements. The downright "Hunker" Conservative, who is very likely to pass over to and identify himself with the first class, hates with a natural, ineradicable hate all political and spiritual advancement. He takes material and selfish, and consequently low and narrow views of things,—and having secured for himself and his wife, for his son John and his wife, privilege to eat and sleep and cohabit, he cannot see the necessity of any further progress. If he is enterprising, it is to increase his blessings in this world; if devout, it is to perpetuate them in the next: for sincere religion he has none,—since religion is but another name for Love, inspiring hope, charity, and a zeal for the welfare of all mankind.—Others are conservative from timidity, or because they are wedded to tranquility. "Oh yes," they say, "no doubt the cause you are fighting for is just; but then fighting is so dreadful! Let us have peace,—peace at any cost!" Good-hearted people as far as they go, but lacking in constitution. To them the fiery torrents of generosity and heroism are unknown. Numbers of these, it is true, were swept away by the flood of enthusiasm which prevailed during the first days of the Rebellion; but when it appeared that the insurgents were not to be overawed and put down by noise,—that making speeches and hanging out flags would not do the business,—they became alarmed: the thought of actual bloodshed, and taxes, and a disturbance of trade developed the Aguecheek. "Good heavens!" said they, picking up the hats they has tossed with cheers into the sky, and carefully brushing down the ruffled nap to its former respectable smoothness, "this will never do! we can't frighten 'em!" So they concluded to be frightened themselves, and ran back to their comfortable apron-strings of opinion held by their grandmothers. Strange as it seems, many of these are persons of piety, taste, and culture. Yet their culture is retrospective, their taste mere dillettanteism, and their piety conventional: to whatever is new in theology, or vital in literature, (at least until the cobwebs of age begin to gather upon it,) and especially to whatever tends to overthrow or greatly modify the ancient order of things, they are unalterably opposed. If occasionally one of them becomes desirous of keeping up with the times, or is forced along momentarily by the stream of events, some defect of mental or moral constitution prevents his progress; and you are sure to find him soon or late returning to the point from which he started, like those bits of drift-wood which are always bobbing up and down close under the fall or circling round and round in the eddies. The trouble is, such sticks float too lightly onthe surface of things; if they carried more heart-ballast, and would sink deeper, the current would bear them on.—Another variety of the Conservative is the man who is really progressive and right-minded, but extremely slow. Give him time, and he is certain to form a just judgment, and range himself on the right side at last. He goes with the rest only so far as they travel his road, and his lagging is pretty sure to be atoned for by earnest endeavor in the end. With these are to be classed numerous other varieties: those who are "Hunkerish" on account of some strange spiritual obtuseness, or from misanthropy, or perverseness, or self-conceit, or a cold and sluggish temperament, or from weak, human sympathies governed by strong political prejudice,—together with those countless larvæ and tadpoles, the small-fry of sons and nephews, of individuality yet undeveloped, who are conservative because their fathers and uncles are conservative.
Such was the Opposition, to which we have devoted so many words, because, though signally defeated, much of its power and influence survives. The fact that it proved to be as large as it was is by no means discouraging: that there should have been so much flabby and diseased flesh on the body-politic was to have been expected; and that it would show itself chiefly in the large cities, where foul humors and leprosy are sure to break out, if anywhere, upon slight irritation, (contrast the corrupt vote of New York City with Missouri and Maryland giving their voices for freedom!) was likewise foreseen. That the malady continues, and by what curative process it is to be subdued and rendered harmless,—this is what concerns us now.
We have at last demonstrated, to the satisfaction of our arrogant Southern friends, let us trust, that the despised Yankee, the dollar-worshipper, is as prompt to fight for a principle as they for power and a mistaken right of property,—ready to give blood and treasure without stint, all for an idea; and that, having reluctantly set his foot in gore, to draw back is not possible to him, for his heart is indomitable, and his soul relentless,—in his soul sits Nemesis herself. We have taught the slaveholding insolence the final lesson, that there is absolutely nothing to hope from the pusillanimity it counted upon. To the world abroad, also, that Tuesday's portentous snow-storm of ballots, covering every vestige of treason here, to the trail of the Copperhead, and whitening the face of the whole land with a purer faith, will be more convincing than our victories in the field. The bubble of Republicanism, which was to display such alacrity at bursting, is not the childish thing it was deemed, but granitic, with a fiery, throbbing core; its outward form no mere flashy film, blown out of chimeras and dreams, but a creation from the solid strata of human experience, upheaved here by the birth-throes of a new era:—