Glass. 
 Book. 
 
on \ 
 
 >4a 
 
 <englanti anti limetica* 
 
 A LECTURE 
 
 UEAD BEFORE 
 
 -2^Y 
 
 ./■ 
 
 
 THE BOSTON FRATERNITY, 
 
 PUBLISHED IN THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY FOR DECEMBER, 18G4. 
 
 KY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH, 
 
 BOSTON: 
 TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 
 
 1865. 
 
€n0ianti aiiti ^Imcrica* 
 
 A LECTURE 
 
 BKAD BEFORE 
 
 THE BOSTON FRATERNITY, 
 
 PUBLISHED IN THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY FOR DECEMBER, 1864. 
 
 BY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 
 
 1865. 
 

 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by 
 
 TiCKNOR AND FIELDS, 
 
 in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 
 
 RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
 PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANT. 
 
 J 
 
PEEFATORY. 
 
 New Tori; Dec. 5, 1864. 
 My dear Mr. Loring. 
 
 You purpose to republish in a pamphlet form my Lecture on 
 " England and America," delivered before the Boston Fraternity 
 and published in the " Atlantic Monthly." 
 
 I am very glad that a Lecture of mine on this subject should ap- 
 pear under your auspices, because you are (as I hope I am also) 
 heartily loyal to your own country, for whose rights you have vigor- 
 ously pleaded, as well as sincerely desirous of promoting good-will 
 between the two branches of our I'ace. Nothing in the least degree 
 objectionable on the score of want of loyalty would, I am sure, meet 
 wnth your approbation or be commended to the public by you. 
 
 There is nothing I believe in the Lecture relating to English poli- 
 tics, or to the internal condition of England, which has not been 
 made known to the whole world by the English press. Yet I have 
 spoken of English affairs more freely than I should have done in a 
 foreign country. But I cannot regard America as a foreign coun- 
 try to an Englishman. I could never think that the quarrel between 
 George IIL and the Colonies (in which the English people really 
 had no share) had cancelled the tie of blood or the many other ties 
 which bind the two Englands to each other. 
 
 No Englishman feeling the effect of American events since the 
 commencement of your civil war on the political state of his own 
 country can doubt that a most intimate connection exists between 
 the interests and destinies of the two nations. 
 
 I have avoided all questions between the two Executive Gov- 
 ernments, limiting my remarks to the state of feeling between the 
 nations. 
 
4 PREFATORY. 
 
 Scarcely enough stress perhaps is laid in the Lecture on the ex- 
 cuse afforded to Englishmen and to the world generally for desiring 
 the disruption of the Union by the spirit which former American 
 Governments have manifested in their bearing towards other na- 
 tions. A power, however great, which is guided by morality and 
 honor, affords no just ground of apprehension to its neighbors. 
 But a power so vast as that of America is evidently destined to be, 
 guided by the tyrannical and aggressive spirit of the slave-owner, 
 might well be regarded with apprehension ; and other nations might, 
 without criminal jealousy, rejoice in the prospect of its disruption. 
 
 When the Lecture appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," an excep- 
 tion was, perhaps' not unreasonably, taken to its form, as being too 
 didactic. But I need scarcely say that this form is common to all 
 lectures, and implies no peculiar attitude of mind on the part of the 
 
 ■writer. 
 
 I am, my dear Mr. Loring, 
 
 Very sincerely and gratefully yours, 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH. 
 
 The Hon. Charles G. Loring. 
 
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 sub- 
 ject, 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 politi- 
 cal 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 hab- 
 its 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 hear- 
 ers 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 
 
6 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 23ricle did not siiifer to sleep, and which sometimes 
 galled a haughty nation little patient of defeat. In 
 more recent times there had been a number of dis- 
 j)iites, the more angry because they were between 
 brethren. There had been disjDutes about bounda- 
 ries, 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 
 flict, they are perfectly sincere. You had alarmed 
 and exasperated us by your Ostend manifesto and 
 your scheme for the annexation of Cuba. In these 
 discussions some of your statesmen had shown to- 
 wards us the spirit which Slavery does not fail to 
 engender in the domestic tja^ant ; while, perhaps, 
 some of our statesmen had been too ready to pre- 
 sume bad intentions and anticipate wrong. In our 
 war with Russia your sympathies had been, as we 
 supposed, strongly on the Russian side ; and we — 
 even those among us who least approved the war — 
 had been scandalized at seeing the American Repub- 
 lic 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 j^i'ivy to 
 recruiting in your territories. The fault was ac- 
 knowledged ; but the matter w\as pressed by your 
 Government in a temper which we thought showed 
 a desire to humiliate, and a want of that readiness 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 7 
 
 to accept satisfaction, when frankly tendered, which 
 renders the reparation of an unintentional offence 
 easy and painless between men of honor. These 
 wounds had been inflamed by the unfriendly crit- 
 icism of English writers, who visited a new country 
 without the spirit of philosophic inquiry, and who in 
 collecting materials for the amusement of their coun- 
 trymen sometimes showed themselves a little want- 
 ing in regard for the laws of hospitality, as well as in 
 penetration and in largeness of view. 
 
 Yet beneath this outward estrangement there lay, 
 in the heart of England at least, a deeper feeling, an 
 appeal to which was never unwelcome, even in quar- 
 ters where the love of American institutions least 
 prevailed. I will venture to repeat some words from 
 a lecture addressed a short time before this war to 
 the University of Oxford, which at that time had 
 among its students an English Prince. " The loss of 
 the American Colonies," said the lecturer, speaking 
 of your first Revolution, " was perhaps in itself a gain 
 to both countries. It was a gain, as it emancipated 
 commerce and gave free course to those reciprocal 
 streams of wealth which a restrictive policy had forbid- 
 den to flow. It was a gain, as it put an end to an ob- 
 solete tutelage, which tended to prevent America from 
 learning betimes to walk alone, while it gave Eng- 
 land the puerile and somewhat dangerous pleasure of 
 reia-nino; over those whom she did not and could not 
 govern, but whom she was tempted to harass and 
 insult. A source of military strength colonies can 
 scarcely be. You prevent them from forming proper 
 military establishments of their own, and you drag 
 
8 ENGLAND AND ^AMERICA. 
 
 them into your quarrels at the price of undertaking 
 their defence. The inauguration of free trade was in 
 flict 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 kind- 
 ness 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 our- 
 selves ; be, for your own happiness and for our honor, 
 like ourselves, a nation ' ? But English statesmen, 
 with all their greatness, have seldom known how to 
 anticipate necessity ; too often the sentence of his- 
 tory 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 Avound 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. 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 9 
 
 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 beUef that the two were 
 one again. And, believe me, joy at this complete 
 renewal of our amity was very deeply and widely 
 felt in England. It spread far even among the classes 
 which have shown the greatest want of sympathy for 
 you in the present war. 
 
 England has diplomatic connections — she has 
 sometimes diplomatic intrigues — with the great 
 powers of Europe. For a real alliance she must look 
 here. Strong as is the element of aristocracy in her 
 Government, there is that in her, nevertheless, which 
 makes her cordial understandings with military des- 
 potisms 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 Eng- 
 lish 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 
 
10 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 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 al- 
 most quenched. Hampden and Washington in arms 
 against each other ! What could the Powers of 
 Evil desire more ? When Americans talk lightly of 
 a war with England, one desires to ask them what 
 they believe the effects of such a war would be on 
 their own country. How many more American 
 wives do they wish to make widows ? How many 
 more American children do they wish to make or- 
 phans ? Do they deem it wise to put a still greater 
 strain on the already groaning timbers of the Con- 
 stitution ? Do they think that the suspension of 
 trade and emigration, with the price of labor rising 
 and the harvests of Illinois excluded from their mar- 
 ket, would help you to cope with the financial diffi- 
 culties which fill with anxiety every reflecting mind ? 
 Do they think that four more years of war-govern- 
 ment would render easy the tremendous work of 
 reconstruction ? But the interests of the great com- 
 munity of nations are above the private interests of 
 America or of England. If war were to break out 
 between us, what would become of Italy, abandoned 
 without help to her Austrian enemy and her sinister 
 protector ? What would become of the last hopes 
 of liberty in France ? What would become of the 
 world ? 
 
 English liberties, imperfect as they may be, — and 
 as an English Liberal of course thinks they are, — 
 are the source from which your liberties have flowed, 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. H 
 
 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, alle- 
 giance 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 that, if a kindly 
 feehng continues between us, you may find it desira- 
 ble to take. England by her eight centuries of con- 
 stitutional 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 strug- 
 gled and stumbled onwards through the ages until 
 now, cannot believe in the finality and perfection of 
 any set of institutions, not even of yours. This vast 
 electioneering apparatus, with its strange machinery 
 and discordant sounds, in the midst of which I find 
 myself, — it may be, and I firmly believe it is, better 
 for its purpose than anything that has gone before 
 it ; but is it the crowning effort of mankind ? If our 
 creed — the Liberal creed — be true, American insti- 
 tutions are a great step in advance of the Old World ; 
 but they are not a miraculous leap into a political 
 
12 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 millennium. They are a momentous portion of 
 that continual onward effort of humanity which it is 
 the highest duty of history to trace ; but they are 
 not its final consummation. Model Republic ! How 
 many of these models has the course of ages seen 
 broken and flung disdainfully aside ! You have been 
 able to do great things for the world because your 
 forefathers did great things for you. The generation 
 will come which in its turn will inherit the fruits of 
 your efforts, add to them a little of its own, and in 
 the plenitude of its self-esteem repay you with in- 
 gratitude. 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 m Indian 
 annals, you seek it in Northern sagas. You fondly 
 surround an old windmill with the pomp of Scandi- 
 navian 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, — monu- 
 ments 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 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 13 
 
 sleep. It would as ill become you to cultivate nar- 
 row national memories in regard to the past as it 
 would to cultivate narrow national prejudices at 
 present. You have come out, as from other relics of 
 barbarism which still oppress Europe, so from the 
 barbarism of jealous nationality. You are heirs to 
 all the wealth of the Old World, and must owe grati- 
 tude 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 talis- 
 man of colonization and the pledge of your empire 
 here. She it was, that, having advanced by cen- 
 turies of effort to the front of the Old World, be- 
 came worthy to give birth to the New. From Eng- 
 land 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 Revolution of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, at once the saddest and the noblest period of 
 English history, — the noblest, whether we look to 
 the greatness of the principles at stake, or to the 
 grandeur of the actors who fill the scene. This is 
 not the official version of your origin. The official 
 version makes you the children of the revolutionary 
 spirit which was abroad in the eighteenth century 
 and culminated in the French Revolution. But this 
 
14 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 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 thank- 
 fulness, since the added myriads have been happy, 
 and the wealth has flowed not to a few, but to all. 
 But before 1783 you had founded, under the name 
 of an English Colony, a community emancipated 
 from feudalism ; you had abolished here and doomed 
 to general abolition hereditary aristocracy, and that 
 which is the essential basis of hereditary aristocracy, 
 primogeniture in the inheritance of land. You had 
 established, though under the semblance of depend- 
 ence on the English crown, a virtual sovereignty 
 of the people. You had created the system of com- 
 mon schools, in which the sovereignty of the people 
 has its only safe foundation. You had proclaimed, 
 after some misgivings and backslidings, the doctrine 
 of liberty of conscience, and released the Church 
 from her long bondage to the State. All this you 
 had achieved while you still were, and gloried in 
 being, a colony of England. You have done great 
 things, since your quarrel with George III., for the 
 world as well as for yourselves. But for the world, 
 perhaps, you had done greater things before. 
 
 In Eno-land 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 hered- 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 15 
 
 itary aristocracy and the hierarchy. For a moment 
 we placed a po23iilar chief in power, though Crom- 
 well was obliged by circmnstances, as well as im- 
 pelled 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 free- 
 dom 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 fleshpots, overpowered the hope of the 
 Promised Land ; and the people returned to the rule 
 of Pharaoh and his priests amidst the bonfires of the 
 Restoration. Something had been gained. Kings 
 became more careful how they cut the subject's 
 purse ; bishops, how they clipped the subject's ears. 
 Instead of being carried by Laud to Rome, we re- 
 mained Protestants after a sort, though without lib- 
 erty 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, be- 
 yond 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 
 
16 "ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 when Cromwell died. Milton, when the night of the 
 Kestoration closed on the brief and stormy day of 
 his party, bated no jot of hope. He was strong in 
 that strength of conviction which assures spirits like 
 his of the future, however dark the present may 
 appear. But, could he have beheld it, the morning, 
 moving westward in the track of the Puritan emi- 
 grants, had passed from his hemisphere only to shine 
 again in this with no fitful ray, but with a steady 
 brightness which will one day reillumine the feudal 
 darkness of the Old World. 
 
 The Revolution failed in England. Yet in England 
 the party of Cromwell and Milton still lives. It still 
 lives ; and in this great crisis of your fortunes, its 
 heart turns to you. On your success ours depends. 
 Now, as in the seventeenth century, the thread of 
 our fate is twined with the thread of yours. An 
 English Liberal comes here, not only to watch the 
 unfolding of your destiny, but to read his own. 
 
 Even in the Revolution of 1776 Liberal England 
 was on your side. Chatham was your spokesman, 
 as well as Patrick Henry. We, too, reckon Wash- 
 ington 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 longr become obsolete. It was time to break the 
 cord which held the child to its mother ; and prob- 
 ably there were some on your side, from the first, 
 or nearly from the first, resolved to break it, — men 
 instinct with the revolutionary spirit, and bent on a 
 Republic. All parties were in a false position ; and 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 17 
 
 they could find no way out of it better than civil 
 war. Good-will, not hatred, is the law of the world ; 
 and seldom can history — even the history of the 
 conqueror — look back on the results of war without 
 regret. England, scarcely guilty of the offence of 
 her monarch, drank the cup of shame and disaster 
 to the dregs. That war ruined the French finances, 
 which till then might have been retrieved, past the 
 hope of redemption, and precipitated the Revolution 
 which hurled France through anarchy into despot- 
 ism, and sent Lafayette to a foreign dungeon, and 
 his master to tlie block. You came out victorious ; 
 but, from the violence of the rupture, you took a 
 political bias not perhaps entirely for good ; and the 
 necessity of the war blended you, under equivocal 
 conditions, with other colonies of a wholly difterent 
 origin and character, which then " held persons to 
 service," and are now your half- dethroned tyrant, 
 the Slave Power. This Revolution will lead to a 
 revision of many things, — perhaps to a partial 
 revision of your history. Meantime, let me repeat, 
 England counts Washington among her heroes. 
 
 And now as to the conduct of England towards 
 you in this civil war. It is of want of sympathy, if 
 of anything, on our part, not of want of interest, that 
 you have a right to complain. Never, within my 
 memory, have the hearts of Englishmen been so 
 deeply moved by any foreign struggle as by this 
 civil war, — not even, if I recollect aright, by the 
 great European earthquake of 1848. I doubt wheth- 
 er they were more moved by the Indian mutiny or 
 by our war with Russia. It seemed that history had 
 
 3 
 
18 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 brought round again the great crisis of the Thirty 
 Years' War, when all England throbbed with the 
 mortal struggle waged between the powers of Lib- 
 erty 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. Sev- 
 ered 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 irre- 
 pressible conflict between Aristocracy and Democ- 
 racy; and the heirs of the Cavalier in England 
 sympathize with your enemies, the heirs of the 
 Puritan with you. 
 
 The feeling of our aristocracy, as of all aristoc- 
 racies, 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 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 1§ 
 
 spirit may be shown by a few of the less honorable 
 or more violent members of their order. With all 
 their class-sentiments, they are Englishmen, trained 
 to walk in the paths of English policy and justice. 
 But that their feelings should be against you is not 
 strange. You are fighting, not for the restoration of 
 the Union, not for the emancipation of the negro, 
 but for Democracy against Aristocracy; and this 
 fact is thoroughly understood by both parties 
 throughout the Old World. As the champions of 
 Democracy, you may claim, and you receive, the 
 sympathy of the Democratic party in England and 
 in Europe ; that of the Aristocratic party you cannot 
 claim. You must bear it calmly, if the aristocracies 
 mourn over your victories and triumph over your 
 defeats. Do the friends of Democracy conceal their 
 joy when a despotism or an oligarchy bites the dust ? 
 The members of our aristocracy bear you no per- 
 sonal 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 equal- 
 ity all aristocracies must read their doom. Not by 
 arms, but by example, you are a standing menace to 
 the existence of political privilege. And the thread 
 of that existence is frail. Feudal antiquity holds life 
 by a precarious tenure amidst the revolutionary ten- 
 dencies of this modern world. It has gone hard with 
 the aristocracies throughout Europe of late years, 
 
20 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 though the French Emperor, as the head of the 
 Reaction, may create a mock nobihty round his up- 
 start throne. The Roman aristocracy was an aris- 
 tocracy 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 j)rogress in its hour and after its kind ; 
 it confronted tyrannical kings when the people 
 were as yet too weak to confront them ; it con- 
 quered at Runnymede, as well as at Hastings. 
 But the aristocracies of modern Europe are aristoc- 
 racies neither of arms nor of law. They are aris- 
 tocracies of social and political privileges alone. 
 They owe, and are half conscious that they owe, 
 their present existence only to factitious weaknesses 
 of human nature, and to the antiquated terrors of 
 communities long kept in leading-strings and afraid 
 to walk alone. If there were nothing but reason to 
 dispel them, these fears might long retain their sway 
 over European society. But the example of a great 
 commonwealth flourishing here without a j)i"ivileged 
 class, and of a j)oj)ular 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 re- 
 member that they are men. But the order, as a 
 whole, has been against you, and has swayed in the 
 same direction all who were closely connected with 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 21 
 
 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 Eng- 
 land than against you that the feeling of our aristoc- 
 racy is directed. Liberal leaders have made your 
 name odious by pointing to your institutions as the 
 condemnation of our own. They did this too indis- 
 criminately perhaps, while in one respect your insti- 
 tutions 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 teiTitorial into a government 
 of wealth. This again is nothing new. History can 
 point to more cases than one in which the sym- 
 pathies of rich men have been regulated by their 
 riches. The Money Power has been cold to your 
 cause throughout Europe, — perhaps even here. In 
 all countries great capitalists are apt to desire that 
 the laborer should be docile and contented, that 
 popular education should not be carried dangerously 
 high, that the right relations between capital and 
 
22 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 labor should be maintained. The bold doctrines of 
 the slave-owner as to " free labor and free schools " 
 may not be accepted in their full strength ; yet they 
 touch a secret chord. But we have friends of the 
 better cause among our English capitalists as well as 
 among our English peers. The names of Mr. Baring 
 and Mr. Thomas Bayley Potter are not unknown 
 here. The course taken by such men at this crisis is 
 an earnest of the essential unity of interest which 
 underlies all class-divisions, — which, in our onward 
 progress toward the attainment of a real community, 
 will survive all class-distinctions, and terminate the 
 conflict between capital and labor, not by making 
 the laborer the slave of the capitalist, nor the capital- 
 ist the slave of the laborer, but by establishing be- 
 tween them mutual good-will, founded on intelli- 
 gence 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 unworthj^ of a student of history 
 to preach vulgar hatred of an historic aristocracy. 
 The aristocracy of England has been great in its 
 hour, probably beneficent, perhaps indispensable to 
 the progress of our nation, and so to the foundation 
 of yours. Do you wish for your revenge upon it ? 
 The road to that revenge is sure. Succeed in your 
 great experiment. Show by your example, by your 
 moderation and self-control through this war and 
 after its close, that it is possible for communities, 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 23 
 
 dul}^ 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 uj)on the English nation, would only 
 strengthen the w^orst part of the English aristocracy 
 in the worst way, by bringing our people into colli- 
 sion with a Democracy, and by giving the ascend- 
 ancy, as all wars not carried on for a distinct moral 
 object do, to military passions over political aspira- 
 tions. Our war with the French Republic threw 
 back our internal reforms, which till then had been 
 advancing, for a whole generation. Even the pock- 
 ets of our land-owners would not suffer, but gain, by 
 the w^ar ; for their rents would be raised by the ex- 
 clusion of your corn, and the price of labor would be 
 lowered by the stoppage of emigration. The suffer- 
 ing would fall, as usual, on the people. 
 
 The gradual effect of your example may enable 
 European society finally to emerge from feudalism, 
 in a peaceful way, without violent revolutions. 
 Every one who has studied history must regard 
 violent revolutions with abhorrence. A European 
 Liberal ought to be less inclined to them than ever, 
 when he has seen America, and received from the 
 sight, as I think he may, a complete assurance of 
 the future. 
 
 I have spoken of our commercial aristocracy gen- 
 erally. Liverpool 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 honor to the 
 
24 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 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 polit- 
 ical and social questions, — literature, — even relig- 
 ious thought, — something of that high aspiring 
 spirit which made commerce noble in the old Eng- 
 lish 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, per- 
 haps, 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, con- 
 taminated by intercourse with the slave-owner, re- 
 gardless of the honor and interest of their country, 
 ready to plunge two kindred nations into a desolat- 
 ing war, if they can only secure the profits of their 
 own trade. England must own that she has pro- 
 duced such men ; but does this disgrace attach to 
 her alone ? 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 25 
 
 The clergy of the State Church, like the aristoc- 
 racy, have probably been as a body against 3^011 in 
 this struggle. In their case too, not hatred of Amer- 
 ica, but the love of their own institution, is the 
 cause. If you are a standing menace to aristoc- 
 racies, 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 out- 
 ward uniformity of a political Church, rather than 
 risk a change, which, as they are taught to believe, 
 would bring faith to a sudden end. But the success 
 of the voluntary system here is overthrowing this 
 assumption. Shall I believe that Christianity de- 
 prived of State support must fall, when I see it with- 
 out State support not only standing, but advancing 
 with the settler into the remotest West ? Will the 
 laity of Europe long remain under their illusion in 
 face of this great flict ? Already the State Churches 
 of Europe are placed in imminent peril by the con- 
 troversies which, since religious life has reawakened 
 among us, rend them from within, and by their 
 manifest inability to satisfy the craving of society 
 for new assurance of its faith. I cannot much blame 
 the High-Church bishop who goes to Lord Palmer- 
 ston to ask for intervention in company with Lord 
 4 
 
26 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 Clanricarde and Mr. Spence. You express surprise 
 that the son of Wilberforce is not with you; but 
 Wilberforce was not, Uke his son, a bishop of the 
 State Church. Never in the whole course of history 
 has the old order of things yielded without a murmur 
 to the new. You share the fate of all innovators : 
 your innovations are not received with favor by the 
 powers which they threaten ultimately to sweep 
 away. 
 
 To come from our aristocracy and landed gentry 
 to our middle class. We subdivide the middle class 
 into upper and lower. The upper middle class, com- 
 prising the wealthier tradesmen, forms a sort of 
 minor aristocracy in itself, with a good deal of aris- 
 tocratic feeling towards those beneath it. It is not 
 well educated, for it will not go to the common 
 schools, and it has few good private schools of its 
 own ; consequently, it does not think deeply on 
 great political questions. It is at present very 
 wealthy ; and wealth, as you know, does not always 
 produce high moral sentiment. It is not above a 
 desire to be on the genteel side. It is not free from 
 the worship of Aristocracy. That worship is rooted 
 in the lower part of our common nature. Its fibres 
 extend beyond the soil of England, beyond the soil 
 of Europe. America has been much belied, if she 
 is entirely free from this evil, if there are not here 
 also men careful of class-distinctions, of a place in 
 fashionable society, of factitious rank which parodies 
 the aristocracy of the Old World. There is in the 
 Anglo-Saxon character a strange mixture of inde- 
 pendence and servility. In that long course of con- 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 27 
 
 cessions by which your pohticians strove — happily 
 for the world and for yourselves they strove in 
 vain — to conciliate the slave-owning aristocracy 
 of the Sonth, did not something of social servility 
 mingle with political fear ? 
 
 In the lower middle class religious Non-Conformity 
 prevails ; and the Free Churches of our Non-Con- 
 formists 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 struo-o-le ao;ainst 
 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 ad- 
 dress to your Government and people. 
 
 And as to the middle classes generally, upper or 
 lower, I see no reason to think that they are want- 
 ing in good-will to this country, much less that 
 they desire that any calamity should befall it. The 
 journals which I take to be the chief organs of the 
 upper middle class, if they have not been friendly, 
 have been hostile not so much to the American 
 people as to the war. And in justice to all classes 
 of Englishmen, it must be remembered that hatred 
 of the war is not hatred of the American people. 
 No one hated the war at its commencement more 
 heartily than I did. I hated it more heartily than 
 ever after Bull Run, when, by the accounts which 
 reached England, the character of this nation seemed 
 
28 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 to have completely broken down. I believed as 
 fully as any one, that the task which you had un- 
 dertaken was hopeless, and that 3'Ou were rushing 
 on your ruin. I dreaded the effect on your Consti- 
 tution, fearing, as others did, that civil war would 
 bring you to anarchy, and anarchy to military des- 
 potism. 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 institu- 
 tions w^hich 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 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 29 
 
 passions which it kindles, as Avell as in the blood 
 -which it sheds, — terrible in its present eflects, 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 your- 
 selves, — 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, be- 
 cause at present the greater part of them are with- 
 out 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 
 
30 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 to a political question. They never read a news- 
 j)aper. They are absorbed in the struggle for daily 
 bread, of which they have barely enough for them- 
 selves 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- 
 Avill. 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 w^ork- 
 ing-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 doubt- 
 ful form. They have folloAved your wavering for- 
 tunes 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 be- 
 fore 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 pres- 
 ent 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 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 31 
 
 orator, you would have known that you were not 
 without sympathy in England, — not without sym- 
 pathy such as those who look rather to the worth 
 of a friend than to his rank may most dearly prize. 
 Again I Avas 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 fluuine, 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 re- 
 ceived 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 
 
32 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 war paralyzed their industry, brought ruin into their 
 houses, deprived them and their famihes 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 aristoc- 
 racy 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 sjDoken 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 Par- 
 liamentary Reform. In that way it made its for- 
 tune ; and having made its fortune, it takes part 
 with the rich. Its proprietor in those days was a 
 man with many fiiults, but he was a man of the 
 people. Aristocratic society disliked and excluded 
 him ; he lived at war with it to the end. Aflfronted 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 33 
 
 by the Whigs, he became in a certain sense a Tory ; 
 but he luiited his Toryism with Chartism, and was 
 sent to Parhament for Nottingham by Tories and 
 Chartists combined. The opposition of his jour- 
 nal to our New Poor-Law evinced, though in a per- 
 verse way, his feehng for the people. But his heir, 
 the present projDrietor, was born in the purple. He 
 is a wealthy landed gentleman. He sits in Parlia- 
 ment for a constituency of landlords. He is thought 
 to have been marked out for a peerage. It is ac- 
 cusing him of no crime to suppose, that, so flir 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 con- 
 servative 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 Avorld. The present editor of the 
 "Times" wears the mask to the objects of his criti- 
 cism, but drops it, as has been remarked in Parlia- 
 ment, in "the gilded saloons" of rank and power. 
 Not content to remain in the privacy which pro- 
 tected 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 
 
34 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 Money Power, the thrones and dominions of Usury, 
 have shown themselves as assiduous as ministers and 
 peers ; and these potentates happen, hke the aris- 
 tocracy, 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 over- 
 acted his part. English peers, after all, are English 
 gentlemen ; and no English gentleman would de- 
 liberately 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 amono; nations. 
 But the " Times" will not come off unscathed. It 
 must veer with victory. And its readers Avill 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 im- 
 pugning 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 as- 
 sailed 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 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 35 
 
 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 peo- 
 ple idolize Garibaldi, and receive him with a burst 
 of enthusiasm unexampled in fervor. The English 
 people love Garibaldi, and Garibaldi's name is equal- 
 ly dear to all American hearts. Is not this — let me 
 ask in passing — a proof that there is a bond of 
 sympathy, after all, between the English people and 
 you, and that, if as a nation we are divided from 
 you, it is not by a radical estrangement, but by 
 some cloud of error which will in time pass away ? 
 • The wealth of the " Times," the high position 
 which it has held since the period when it was the 
 great Liberal journal, the clever writing and the 
 early intelligence which its money and its secret 
 connections with public men enable it to command, 
 give it a circulation and an influence beyond the 
 class whose interests it represents. But it has been 
 thrust from a large part of its dominion by the cheap 
 London and local press. It is exceeded in circula- 
 tion 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 arti- 
 cles 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 
 
36 ENGLAND AND AMEKICA. 
 
 among the same class as the " Times " ; its circula- 
 tion is comparatively small, but it is on the increase, 
 and the journal, I have reason to believe, is prosper- 
 ous. 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 pro- 
 ducing 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 heart- 
 ily 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 peri- 
 odicals have exhibited, as might have been expected, 
 very various shades of opinion ; but, with the excep- 
 tion of the known organs of violent Toryism, they 
 have certainly not breathed hatred of this nation. 
 Li those which specially represent our rising intel- 
 lect, 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 Uni- 
 versity 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 senti- 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 37 
 
 ment 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 alle- 
 giance of my heart. In that case, intellect, in point- 
 ing out the evil, only does its duty. 
 
 One English writer has certainly raised his voice 
 against you with characteristic vehemence and rude- 
 ness. As an historical painter and a humorist Car- 
 lyle 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, 
 
38 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 SO much the worse for the moral law. On this the- 
 ory, a Commonwealth such as yours ought not to 
 exist ; and you must not be surprised, if, in a fit of 
 sj)leen, 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 brill- 
 iant 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, find- 
 ing 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 differ- 
 ent age, and the Cromwell of this age is an intelli- 
 gent, resolute, and united people. 
 
 I might mention other eccentricities of opinion 
 quite distinct from the general temper of the Eng- 
 lish nation, such as that of the ultra-scientific school, 
 which thinks it unscientific philanthropy to ascribe 
 
ENGLAND AND AMEBIC A. 39 
 
 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 fluctua- 
 tions and oscillations wdiich 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 disappoint- 
 ment 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 beo-an. The Emj-land 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 disap- 
 pointment : I do not say there has been none. Eng- 
 land 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, reaction- 
 ary 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 Continen- 
 tal nations in the abortive revolutions of 1848, and 
 
40 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 by England in a less degree in the struggle for Par- 
 liamentary Reform. In the religious sphere it pre- 
 sents 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 them- 
 selves 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 deter- 
 mined, though covert, enemies of Reform. The an- 
 cient 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 Revolu- 
 tion, we see a number of conversions to the Church 
 of Rome. On the other hand, strange physical su- 
 perstitions, 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 oi 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 41 
 
 the reaction appear everywhere. A tone of affected 
 cynicism pervades a portion of our high intellect; 
 and a pretended j)assion for jorize-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 con- 
 federate, 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 ftiith, a less aspiring 
 hour ? Have not you, too, known a temporary as- 
 cendancy of material over spiritual interests, a low- 
 ering of the moral tone, a readiness, for the sake of 
 ease and peace and secure enjoyment, to compro- 
 mise 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 calam- 
 ities 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 for- 
 ward the regeneration of the European nations. It 
 is the function which all nations, which all men, in 
 
 6 
 
42 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 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 sub- 
 ject, though I hope without shaking our principles. 
 You ask whether Ensrland can have been sincere in 
 
 o 
 
 her enmity to Slavery, when she refuses sympathy 
 to you in your struggle with the Slave Power. Tal- 
 leyrand, 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 in- 
 terest. She counts that achievement higher than 
 her victories. She sj)ends annually much money 
 and many lives and risks much enmity in her cru- 
 sade 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 Eng- 
 lishman 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. 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 43 
 
 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 be- 
 fore 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, notwithstand- 
 ing your change, — a change which they imagined 
 to be wrought merely by expediency, — they re- 
 tained 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 reason- 
 ably expect. And remember — I say it not with 
 any desire to trench on American politics or to pass 
 judgment on American parties — that the restora- 
 tion 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 
 
44 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 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 deg- 
 radation of labor in his dominions he had no man- 
 ufactures 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 re- 
 ceived what seemed authoritative confirmation from 
 the language of statesmen here. 
 
 I might mention many other things which have 
 influenced ojDinion 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 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 45 
 
 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 x\merican press. The worst things said in Eng- 
 land of your statesmen, of your generals, of your 
 armies, of 3^our 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 x\merican society have been so foul as those 
 which came from a renegade American writing in 
 one of our Tory journals under the name of " Man- 
 hattan." No lamentations over the subversion of the 
 Constitution and the destruction of personal liberty 
 have been louder than those of your own Opf)osition. 
 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 
 
46 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 foreigners. I have seen your President accused of 
 wishing to provoke riots in New York that he might 
 have a pretence for exercising niihtary power. I 
 have seen him accused of sending to the front, to be 
 thinned, a regiment which was hkely to vote against 
 him. I have seen him accused of decoying his poht- 
 ical 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 Eng- 
 lishman coming among you is soon assured that you 
 do not wish to attack Canada. Apart from consid- 
 erations 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 i^rocrustean 
 centralization, is the best thing for the New as well 
 as for the Old World. But the mass of our peo- 
 ple 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, — mis- 
 taken both in thinking that you wish to seize Can- 
 ada, and in thinkino; that a division of the Union 
 into two hostile nations, which would compel 3^ou to 
 keep a standing army, would render you less dan- 
 gerous to your neighbors. But your own dema- 
 
ENGLAND AND AMI:RICA. 47 
 
 gognes are the authors of the error; and the Mon- 
 roe doctrme and the Osteiid manifesto are still rin*»"- 
 ing in onr ears. I am an adherent of the Monroe 
 doctrine, if it means, as it did on the hps of Can- 
 ning, that the reactionary hifluence of the old Euro- 
 pean 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 feel- 
 ings 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 Colo- 
 nies were on the eve of the American Revolution. 
 As a dependency, it is of no solid value to England 
 since she has ceased to eno;ross the Colonial trade. 
 It distracts her forces, and prevents her from acting 
 with her full weight in the affairs of her own quar- 
 ter of the world. It belongs in every sense to Amer- 
 ica, not to Europe ; and its peculiar institutions — 
 its extended suffrage, its freedom from the heredi- 
 tary principle, its voluntary S3\stem in religion, its 
 common schools — are opposed to those of England, 
 and identical with those of the neii^hborino; States. 
 All this the English nation is beginning to feel ; and 
 it has tried in the case of the Ionian Islands the pol- 
 icy 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 forma- 
 
48 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 tion between the North-American Colonies tends 
 manifestly to a further change ; it tends to a further 
 change all the more manifestly because such a ten- 
 dency 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 j)roud 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 ig- 
 norance, — 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 na- 
 tion of travellers as you are, and scarcely one Eng- 
 lishman has seen America for a hundred Americans 
 that have seen England. " Why does not Beaure- 
 gard 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 Eng- 
 lishman 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 Eng- 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 49 
 
 land, 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 is- 
 sues hang upon our acts, perhaps upon our words, 
 let us control our fancies and distinguish realities 
 from fictions. There hangs over every great strug- 
 gle, 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 nat- 
 ural effects of a violent revolution — the depreciation 
 of the assignats, the disturbance of trade, the conse- 
 quent scarcity of food — were ascribed by frantic 
 rhetoricians to the guineas of Pitt, whose very lim- 
 ited amount of secret-service money was quite inad- 
 equate 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 
 
50 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 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 throw^s 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 am- 
 bassadors 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 Com- 
 mons done ? Threatening motions were announced 
 in favor of Eecognition, — in defence of the Confed- 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 51 
 
 erate 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 Gov- 
 ernment 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 fic- 
 tion. 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 rio;ht with the strono; hand. And 
 one consequence is that governments are induced to 
 rest in narrow technicalities, and to be ruled by for- 
 mal precedents, when the question ought to be de- 
 cided on the broadest grounds of right. Tlie 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 Inter- 
 
52 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 national Law. Would there were reason to hope 
 that it mio-ht lead to the erection of some hioi-h tribu- 
 nal 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, 
 Eno;land has refused to recoo-nize 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 can- 
 not bear the moral rebuke, of nei(*:liborino; freedom. 
 The new French satrapy in Mexico needs some more 
 congenial and some weaker neighbor than the United 
 Eepublic, 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 noth- 
 ing has been so injurious to your success. For my- 
 self, in common with all who think as I do on these 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 53 
 
 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 mio-litier 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 
 
54 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 overthrew France and Spain upon this continent, 
 and made America the land of the Anglo-Saxon race. 
 Haliflxx will share the destinies of the North-Amer- 
 ican 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 Eng- 
 lishman 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 chano-ed thouo-ht and feelino; 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 man- 
 kind. They bore themselves towards her in these 
 controversies as they bore themselves towards you, 
 — as their character compels them to bear them- 
 selves towards all with whom they have to deal. 
 Living in their own homes above law, they pro- 
 
ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 55 
 
 claimed 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 dis- 
 paragement 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 assert- 
 ing 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 chil- 
 
56 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 dren'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. 
 
/^-Tl