544 A BOLD FRIEND IN PARLIAMENT. general terms. The exceptions to its truth are only exceptions, the general accusation I have proved from British sources to be true. The sad consequences which will come of all this in the future, no man can tell. We shall dwell upon so unwelcome a subject no longer. XV. IT T is a far more grateful office to turn to the noble efforts made in behalf of the preservation of our Republic, by the great champions of Liberty and Free Institutions in England. While all others bent before the storm, they spoke, and wrote, and worked, unwearied and undaunted, till they saw all the prophecies of our enemies fail, and the beacon-fires of the Great Republican Lighthouse once more blazing on the beaming eyes of the doubting, but still hoping nations. In July, 1862, Mr. Taylor, a Conservative member of the House of Commons, said: He regretted that the honorable gentleman had not accepted the advice to withdraw a motion which was without any possible advantage, and without any possible object except adding to the irritation and bitterness felt with regard to our position upon the question. The honorable gentleman said that, from reading the papers, he was inclined to think those feelings could not be worse. But he differed from him; and, although he admitted that exaggerated and mistaken opinions prevailed in the North, there was a great deal of ground for their bitterness and irritation. [Loud and repeated cries of "No."] America had a right to expect that, with our Anti-Slavery opinions, we should have looked with calmer eyes upon the struggle between the North and South. A certain portion, and a not uninfluential portion of the English press had dealt anything but fairly with the Northern States. He hardly knew whether upon the merits or demerits of the Northern Government this portion of the press was the most bitter. The censure was diverse and inconsistent. First, it was said to be ridiculous for a Republic to go to war, and that it could not have that individuality of power necessary to enable it to strike a blow with effect; but when the Northern States resolved that they would put down faction, and even give up individual liberty and liberty of the press, [hear,] they were called tyrannical and dictatorial. One day they were told they could not carry on the war because they could not raise the money; and the next day they were told they were extravagant and thriftless in their expenditure. [Hear, hear.] They were denounced because they did not pass tax bills to raise revenue, and when the tax bills were passed and the tariff increased, they were blamed for their bad policy. [Hear, hear.] They were denounced as hypocritical for professing to fight for the slaves, and yet as soon as they had shown distinctly the direction of their wishes by prohibiting Slavery in the Central District of Columbia, they were told they were not dealing justly with the State Rights of the South. The amendment they were now discussing had been once or twice changed, and cach time it was more diluted than before; but, no doubt, the honorable gentleman meant by mediation, recognition of the South, [hear hear,] and intervention in the North. Intervention was only a longer name for war. GOLDWIN SMITH'S DEFENCE. 545 Never was so tremendous an issue so easily, so lightly, and with so slight a recognition of its importance, raised as had been this issue by the honorable member. It would be a fratricidal war, almost as truly as that which was being fought between the South and the North-a war which would strike terror unto all the friends of progress and liberty, and be rejoiced at by all who were their foes. XVI. SOME OME of the principal libels of the London Times were boldly and effectually disposed of by Mr. Goldwin Smith, who has endeared himself to every true friend of humanity and justice throughout the world. He writes to the London Daily News: SIR, The Times, in a tirade against the Federals, says: "This war has been carried on with a cruelty which far surpasses anything which can be laid to the charge of England, though the lapse of eighty years has softened men's manners, and has caused humanity to be respected even in the camp." In our last war with America, only fifty years ago, Sir Charles Napier witnessed the sack of Little Hampton by the British, and he states that on that occasion "every horror was perpetrated with impunity-rape, murder, pillage-and not a man was punished." Further on, in his diary of the same war, he says: "Strong is my dislike to what is perhaps a necessary part of our job, viz., plundering and ruining the peasantry. We drive all their cattle, and of course ruin them. My hands are clean, but it is hateful to see the poor Yankees robbed, and to be the robber." The Times talks, with the looseness of vague vituperation, about "towns burnt in diabolical wantonness." The burning of all the public buildings of Washington by the British, is excused by British historians on the ground that the war between us and the Americans was "almost a civil war." There is only too much force in the excuse. The standard of the British soldier's conduct, we may proudly say, is on the whole as high in point of humanity as it is in point of valor. And judged by that standard, or by any other standard of military conduct known to history, the war on the Federal side has hitherto been remarkably humane. Not a single case of cruelty to a prisoner or a non-resistant, so far as I am aware, has yet been authenticated. Horrible stories were told of wholesale massacres and rape, but they have proved to be utterly unfounded. General Butler's "massacres" at New Orleans shrank into the military execution of a single Confederate for an outrage to the Federal flag which no commander could have overlooked, while two soldiers, as your correspondent informs us, were executed for maltreatment of the inhabitants. The wife of General Beauregard lived in perfect security under the government of the Federal commanders. The violation of all the ladies in a boarding-school by Mitchell's men, with the sanction of their commander, seems to be completely disproved; at all events, not a particle of evidence has been adduced in support of the charge. There has been great and cruel destruction of property by the Federals on land, and by the Confederates at sea; and the only difference between the two cases is, that the Confederate Government had partly effaced, by its general impressments, the private character of property within its jurisdiction, while the private character of the property destroyed by the Alabama and her consorts remained uneffaced. The ravages of the Alabama were applauded by the House of Commons, and our Southern press was loud in its exultation over the great booty swept away from the Federal territory by the invading army of General Lee. The Times, the other day, published in large type, and in the most conspicuous part of the paper, the letter of Captain Semmes, charging the commander of the Kearsarge with inhuman 546 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. ity in having willfully delayed to send boats to the assistance of the drowning men of the Alabama. In the same paper, but in small type and at the very bottom of the last column, appeared the intelligence that sixty-two of the Alabama's men saved by the Kearsarge had bcen landed at Cherbourg. The Captain of the Kearsarge, in spite of very exasperating circumstances, has treated his prisoners with chivalrous kindness, as the men themselves aeknowledge. This we see, and we may judge from it of that which we do not see. The massacre of the garrison of Fort Pillow by the Confederates, after surrender, is, on the other hand, perfectly authenticated. It is avowed by the Confederates themselves. The Southern journals in this country have found themselves compelled, in the interest of morality and justice, to pass it over in silence. The Times, however, had an allusion to it in a leading article, so worded as to lead its readers to believe that the atrocity had been committed on the Federal side. GOLDWIN SMITH. XVII. W TILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, in the New York Evening Post, well says : "All the articles of the Times, and it might be added, of the Saturday Review, come to one practical conclusion—the utter incapacity, brutality, and folly of the Americans of the North. It was lost in admiration of the skill of the four European nations which took just two years to capture the single fortress of Sebastopol; it had no terms in which to express its sense of the military energy that enabled Great Britain to put down the revolt of the Sepoys in about twenty-eight months; and it even lauds the success of the French in impoverished and distracted Mexico, who in the incredibly short time of twenty-three months have marched from Vera Cruz to the capital, a distance of one hundred and eighty-five miles, taking one fortified town on the way. But for the degenerate Yankees, who have been actually two years and a half in blockading five thousand miles of sea-coast, defending two thousand miles of menaced frontier, opening a river a thousand miles long, in hostile possession on both banks, re-conquering two hundred and fifty thousand square miles of territory, and fighting hundreds of battles, some of them rivaling Waterloo in the numbers engaged-it has nothing but contempt. Such mournful proofs of imbecility in the Government, of incapacity in the Generals, of cowardice and lack of enthusiasm in the troops, and of complete moral indifference and conception among the people, provoke its perpetual ire, and the choicest language of indignant vituperation." But we have space for no more matter of this kind. It was necessary, however, to give a few samples of British feeling towards us during the dark days of the Republic. In another place we assign the motives which swayed England in her otherwise strange and unnatural conduct towards us-conduct she is perfectly sure in any event to lament deeply hereafter. In speaking of the Queen's graceful letter to Mr. Peabody, in recognition of his “more than princely munificence," the London Times says: "It is to an American that we are indebted for the greatest boon ever given to the poor of London, and it is to a citizen of the United States that the Queen has thought it right to address this personal expression of gratitude. We cannot but believe that such an occurrence will have no little influence in augmenting the good feeling which should prevail between the two countries. Mr. Peabody has done more to foster among us a kindly feeling for his countrymen than could have been effected by a generation of statesmen, and the Queen's letter will, we hope, be received by the Americans as a conspicuous evidence of the friendly regard toward them which such acts have called forth on our part. Between no two countries are friendly relations more natural than between England and America, and we trust that this story of munificence and of gratitude may long be remembered in both nations as a pledge of peace and friendship." Somewhat of a change in the tone of "The Leading Journal of Europe" since the close of our civil war! |