ENGLISH SENTIMENTS AND POLICY.

579 class sprung the noblest poets and philosophers, whose words built up the intellect of its people; skillful navigators, to find out the many paths of the oceans; discoverers in natural cience, whose inventions guided its industry to wealth, until it equaled any nation of the world in letters, and excelled all in trade and commerce. But its government was become a government of land, and not of men; every blade of grass was represented, but only a sinall minority of the people. In the transition from the feudal forms, the heads of the social organization freed themselves from the military services which were the conditions of their tenure, and, throwing the burdens on the industrial classes, kept all the soil to themselves. Vast estates that had been managed by monasteries as endowments for religion and charity, were appropriated to swell the wealth of courtiers and favorities: and the commons, where the poor man once had his right of pasture, were taken away, and, under forms of law, enclosed distributively within their own domains. Although no law forbade any inhabitant from purchasing land, the costliness of the transfer constituted a prohibition; so that it was the rule of that country that the plough should not be in the hands of its owner. The church was rested on a contradiction, claiming to be an embodiment of absolute truth, and yet was a creature of the statute book.

HER SENTIMENTS.

The progress of time increased the terrible contrast between wealth and poverty; in their years of strength, the laboring people, cut off from all share in governing the state, derived a scanty support from the severest toil, and had no hope for old age but in public charity or death. A grasping ambition had dotted the world with military posts, kept watch over our borders on the northeast, at the Bermudas, in the West Indies, held the gates of the Pacific, of the Southern and of the Indian oceans, hovered on our northwest at Vancouver, held the whole of the newest continent, and the entrances to the Mediterranean and Red Sea, and garrisoned forts all the way from Madras to China. That aristocracy had gazed with terror on the growth of a commonwealth where freeholds existed by the millions, and religion was not in bondage to the State; and now they could not repress their joy at its perils. They had not one word of sympathy for the kind-hearted poor man's son whom America had chosen for her chief; they jeered at his large hands, and long feet, and ungainly stature; and the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs made haste to send word through the palaces of Europe that the great republic was in its agony, that the republic was no more, that a head-stone was all that remained due by the law of nations to "the late Union." But it is written, "Let the dead bury their dead;" they may not bury the living. Let the dead bury their dead; let a bill of reform remove the worn-out government of a class, and infuse new life into the British constitution by confiding rightful power to the people.

a race.

HER POLICY.

But while the vitality of America is indestructible, the British government hurried to do what never before had been done by Christian powers, what was in direct conflict with its own exposition of public law in the time of our struggle for independence. Though the insurgent States had not a ship in an open harbor, it invested them with all the rights of a belligerent, even on the ocean; and this, too, when the rebellion was not only directed against the gentlest and most beneficent government on earth, without a shadow of justifiable cause, but when the rebellion was directed against human nature itself for the perpetual enslavement of And the effect of this recognition was that acts in themselves piratical found shelter in British courts of law. The resources of British capitalists, their workshops, their armories, their private arsenals, their shipyards, were in league with the insurgents, and every British harbor in the wide world became a safe port for British ships, manned by British sailors, and armed with British guns, to prey on our peaceful commerce; even on our ships coming from British ports, freighted with British products, or that had carried gifts of grain to the English poor. The Prime Minister in the House of Commons, sustained by cheers, scoffed at the thought that their laws could be amended at our request, so as to preserve real neutrality;

580

INTERNATIONAL ANTAGONISM.

and to remonstrances, now owned to be just, their Secretary answered that they could not change their laws ad infinitum.

RELATIONS WITH ENGLAND.

The people of America then wished, as they always have wished, as they still wish, friendly relations with England; and no man in England or America can desire it more strongly than I. This country has always yearned for good relations with England. Thrice only in all its history has that yearning been fairly met; in the days of Hampden and Cromwell, again in the first ministry of the elder Pitt, and once again in the ministry of Shelburne. Not that there have not at all times been just men among the peers of Britain-like Halifax, in the days of James the Second, or a Granville, an Argyll, or a Houghton in ours; and we cannot be indifferent to a country that produces statesmen like Cobden and Bright; but the best bower anchor of peace was the working-class of England, who suffered most from our civil war, but who, while they broke their diminished bread in sorrow, always encouraged us to persevere.

WH

XIX.

HATEVER antagonism existed between the American system and the British system of government and society, at the commencement of our independent history, still exists and must continue, till the English system is popularized. No radical change can be looked for on our side. Democracy is the corner-stone of our whole being, as a nation-Aristocracy is the corner-stone of the whole British being-the difference is correspondingly great between the two superstructures. The Democratic spirit pervades, permeates, and inspires all our laws and institutions-all the acts and policies of individuals and communities. All this must continue here, and greatly expand, and extend through the nations, until the Democratic principle shall rule the world.

Most English writers and statesmen have predicted the failure of our Republican institutions; especially did they on the outbreak of the Rebellion. But just at the moment when their predictions were, if ever, to prove true, exactly the reverse was demonstrated. It has now become clear enough, we hope, to them and to the whole world, that if our Republic was to prove a failure, it would not be owing to Democracy, but the lack of it. Our body politic was not sound. It held a cancer in its very center-an Aristocratic element—a foreign substance which had to be got out to save Democracy. To do this was

HOW OUR REPUBLIC WAS SAVED.

581

the boldest act of surgery ever undertaken by a public ruler of a free State. The hemorrhage was frightful, but the national life was saved. Now we show a new sight to the world-Democracy saved by and through the death of our Aristocratic element-saved by removing the only unhealthy obstruction in our system-the only way the work could be done. We had healed over the surface; every time festering inflammation and suppuration took place. We had driven the poison back till it became diffused through the whole system. What a spectacle we presented to mankind! Democracy nursing in its bosom the only bane in the universe! Liberty and slavery cultivated side by side! Freedom starved to keep slavery alive! The Goddess of Liberty swimming over the ocean with the rotten corpse of slavery lashed to her waist! The time came to cut loose. That work was done by Lincoln. He won the imperishable renown of saving the Republic which Washington had created. The fact that slavery did not kill us, is owing solely to the strength and vitality of our system.

XX.

NGLAND saw the bolt fall which was to dissolve our

saw holt fall was

Union, and she exulted in the overthrow. When she glanced towards us, before the evil days came, she was disturbed at the sight, especially as she saw twenty-eight millions of free white men in these States, marching on the high road of civilization to the development of a better state of society and government, law and religion, industry and wealth, science and enlightenment, than the earth had ever witnessed before. Illimitable in their resources; varied in their climates; penetrated by navigable rivers; the bowels of their earth charged with all the precious ores and minerals known to commerce and the arts; covered by a net-work of railways in every direction ; cut through by great canals; washed by inland seas, stretching in a vast chain through thousands of miles; constantly increasing in population, with augmenting additions of laborers from

582

ENGLAND EXULTING IN OUR FALL.

the Old World; her people all educated in her schools, colleges and seminaries of learning; her professions all enriched by the best science of the age, and the best intellect of the land; agriculture growing into a science; efficiency in the administration of government; security under obedience to law; thrift in every house; the land owned by the people; every valley and city bristling with machinery; her sailors beating the billows of every ocean from pole to pole; her explorers seeking among the fastnesses of the farthest mountains, and through the sweltering heats of the sandiest and broadest deserts; her authors exploring the archives of ancient nations while they illustrated their own; her missionaries carrying the Bible and the arts of peace to the most distant heathen nations; her jurists illustrating and establishing codes for all time; her domestic architecture growing solid, classic and beautiful; her public works becoming more grand, massive and imposing; her forests yielding their tributes to the necessities and the luxuries of men; and the earth throwing out from her bosom gold enough to enrich the world—such was the spectacle of the great, rich, free, progressing, inseparable and imperishable Republic. All that this broad belt of our Continent ever wanted for its complete development and matchless progress, was to cut loose from its vigorous form the dead weight of African slavery.

England rejoiced when the clouds, which had been so long gathering, began to have their blackness made more visible by the lightnings which wrapped welkin, vale and mountain in a single sheet of flame, and the blood of the nation's heart chilled with horror at the approaching doom. We could not, and we did not believe that, at so early a period of our history, while on the sun-dial of nations' time our Republic yet marked only the earlier hours in the forenoon of life—we did not believe that the great American Republic would so soon shoot from the constellation of nations, to be buried in the unfathomable abyss where all the free States of former ages had been sepulchered. It was too monstrous, too horrible, too awful, to enter at once into the conceptions or the comprehension of men. To the great

GLADSTONE'S POLICY.

583

body of the American people, the spectacle was as terrific and astounding, as the downfall of the Mosaic dispensation to the ancient Jews, when in their very presence the vcil of the temple was rent in twain, and their doom sealed forever.

1

SIN

XXI.

INCE, then, England is disappointed in not seeing the overthrow of the Republic, and finds herself impotent to arrest our commercial progress, she is directing all her energies towards the three next best things-Peace, Free Trade, AND THE EXTENSION OF THE ELECTIVE FRANCHISE. Although during the Rebellion Mr. Gladstone's sympathies were alleged to be with the Rebels, yet hear his words the other day at the great banquet given to him by the Liberal party at Liverpool, where he points to our hitherto detested and vilified example, to justify him in pressing the New Reform Bill. One would almost think it were Sir Robert Peel or Richard Cobden risen from the dead :

About five or six years ago, when the subject of parliamentary reform was under discussion, it was a popular and fashionable practice to speak of the institutions of America as a perfect failure, and long orations were delivered in the House of Commons setting forth all the particulars of that failure, and making use of those institutions as a bugbear to terrify and frighten us from proceeding in the path of our duty, to induce us to withhold our confidence from our countrymen, and insist upon retaining the narrow limits of the present constituency. [Hear, hear.] What has taken place since that? I am not going to deliver a general lecture upon the civil war in America; above all, I am not going to bring forward any invidious distinctions, or any distinctions at all, between one section and another of that great community. For my part, my earnest and devout aspiration is—and I believe that is the aspiration and desire of Englishmen at large-for the welfare of that nation in every part and portion of it, whether it be white or black, North or South. [Applause.] Neither am I going to hold up American institutions as institutions to be preferred to our own. [Hear, hear.] But what I am going to do is this. I think it is our business, as men of sense, to draw lessons from the experience of mankind [hear hear], and from the facts that come under our