Chapter 17

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 despotisms little better than smothered hate. With you she may have a league of the heart. We are united by blood. We are united by a common allegiance to the cause of freedom. You may think that English freedom falls far short of yours. You will allow that it goes beyond any yet attained by the great European nations, and that to those nations it has been and still is a light of hope. I see it treated with contempt here. It is not treated with contempt by Garibaldi. It is not treated with contempt by the exiles from French despotism, who are proud to learn the English tongue, and who find in our land, as they think, the great asylum of the free. Let England and America quarrel. Let your weight be cast into the scale against us, when we struggle with the great conspiracy of absolutist powers around us, and the hope of freedom in Europe would be almost quenched. Hampden and Washington in arms against each other! What could the Powers of Evil desire more? When Americans talk lightly of a war with England, one desires to ask them what they believe the effects of such a war would be on their own country. How many more American wives do they wish to make widows? How many more American children do they wish to make orphans? Do they deem it wise to put a still greater strain on the already groaning timbers of the Constitution? Do they think that the suspension of trade and emigration, with the price of labor rising and the harvests of Illinois excluded from their market, would help you to cope with the financial difficulties which fill with anxiety every reflecting mind? Do they think that four more years of war-government would render easy the tremendous work of reconstruction? But the interests of the great community 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, though the river may be more abundant than the spring. Being in America, I am in England,--not only because American hospitality makes me feel that I am still in my own country, but because our institutions are fundamentally the same. The great foundations of constitutional government, legislative assemblies, parliamentary representation, personal liberty, self-taxation, the freedom of the press, allegiance to the law as a power above individual will,--all these were established, not without memorable efforts and memorable sufferings, in the land from which the fathers of your republic came. You are living under the Great Charter, the Petition of Eight, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Libel Act. Perhaps you have not even yet taken from us all that, if a kindly feeling continues between us, you may find it desirable to take. England by her eight centuries of constitutional progress has done a great work for you, and the two nations may yet have a great work to do together for themselves and for the world. A student of history, knowing how the race has struggled and stumbled onwards through the ages until now, cannot believe in the finality and perfection of any set of 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 institutions are a great step in advance of the Old World; but they are not a miraculous leap into a political 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 ingratitude. The time will come when the memory of the Model Republicans of the United States, as well as that of the narrow Parliamentary Reformers of England, will appeal to history, not in vain, to rescue it from the injustice of posterity, and extend to it the charities of the past.

New-comers among the nations, you desire, like the rest, to have a history. You seek it in Indian annals, you seek it in Northern sagas. You fondly surround an old windmill with the pomp of Scandinavian antiquity, in your anxiety to fill up the void of your unpeopled past. But you have a real and glorious history, if you will not reject it,--monuments genuine and majestic, if you will acknowledge them as your own. Yours are the palaces of the Plantagenets,--the cathedrals which enshrined our old religion,--the illustrious hall in which the long line of our great judges reared, by their decisions, the fabric of our law,--the gray colleges in which our intellect and science found their earliest home,--the graves where our heroes and sages and poets sleep. It would as ill become you to cultivate narrow national memories in regard to the past as it would to cultivate narrow national prejudices at present. You have come out, as from other relics of barbarism which still oppress Europe, so from the barbarism of jealous nationality. You are heirs to all the wealth of the Old World, and must owe gratitude for a part of your heritage to Germany, France, and Spain, as well as to England. Still, it is from England that you are sprung; from her you brought the power of self-government which was the talisman of colonization and the pledge of your empire here. She it was, that, having advanced by centuries of effort to the front of the Old World, became worthy to give birth to the New. From England you are sprung; and 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 wag the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, at once the saddest and the noblest period of English history,--the noblest, whether we look to the greatness of the principles at stake, or to the grandeur of the actors who 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 robs you of a century and a half of antiquity, and of more than a century and a half of greatness. Since 1783 you have had a marvellous growth of population and of wealth,--things not to be spoken of, as cynics have spoken of them, without thankfulness, since the added myriads have been happy, and the wealth has flowed not to a few, but to all. But before 1783 you had founded, under the name of an English Colony, a community emancipated from feudalism; you had abolished here 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 dependence on the English crown, a virtual sovereignty of the people. You had created the system of common schools, in which the sovereignty of the people has its only safe foundation. You had proclaimed, after some misgivings and 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 England the Revolution of the seventeenth century failed. It failed, at least, as an attempt to establish social equality and liberty of conscience. The feudal past, with a feudal Europe to support it, sat too heavy on us to be cast off. By a convulsive effort we broke loose, for a moment, from the hereditary aristocracy and the hierarchy. For a moment we placed a popular chief in power, though Cromwell was obliged by circumstances, as well as impelled by his own ambition, to make himself a king. But when Cromwell died before his hour, all was over for many a day with the party of religious freedom and of the people. The nation had gone a little way out of the feudal and hierarchical Egypt; but the horrors of the unknown Wilderness, and the memory of the flesh-pots, overpowered the hope of the Promised Land; and the people returned to the rule of Pharaoh and his priests amidst the bonfires of the Restoration. Something had been gained. Kings became more careful how they cut the subject's purse; bishops, how they clipped the subject's ears. Instead of being carried by Laud to Rome, we remained Protestants after a sort, though without liberty of conscience. Our Parliament, such as it was, with a narrow franchise and rotten boroughs, retained its rights; and in time we secured the independence of the judges and the integrity of an aristocratic law. But the great attempt had miscarried. English society had made a supreme effort to escape from feudalism and the hierarchy into social justice and religious freedom, and that effort had failed.

Failed in England, but succeeded here. The yoke which in the mother-country we had not strength to throw off, in the colony we escaped; and here, beyond the reach of the Restoration, Milton's vision proved true, and a free community was founded, though in a humble and unsuspected form, which depended on the life of no single chief, and lived on when Cromwell died. Milton, when the night of the Restoration closed on the brief and stormy day of his party, bated no jot of hope. He was strong in that strength of conviction which assures spirits like his of the future, however dark the present may appear. But, could he have beheld it, the morning, moving westward in the track of the Puritan emigrants, had passed from his hemisphere only to shine again in this with no fitful ray, but with a steady brightness which will one day 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 Washington among our heroes. Perhaps there may have been an excuse even for the King. The relation of dependence which you as well as he professed to hold sacred, and which he was bound to maintain, had long become obsolete. It was time to break the cord which held the child to its mother; and probably there were some on your side, from the first, or nearly from the first, resolved to break it,--men instinct with the revolutionary spirit, and bent on a Republic. All parties were in a false position; and they could find no way out of it better than civil war. Good-will, not hatred, is the law of the world; and seldom can history--even the history of the 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 despotism, and sent Lafayette to a foreign dungeon, and his master to the block. You came out victorious; but, from the violence of the rupture, you took a political bias not perhaps entirely for good; and the necessity of the war blended you, under equivocal conditions, with other colonies of a wholly different origin and character, which then "held persons to service," and are now your half-dethroned tyrant, the Slave Power. This Revolution will lead to a revision of many things,--perhaps to a partial revision of your history. Meantime, let me repeat, England counts Washington among her heroes.

And now as to the conduct of England towards you in this civil war. It is of want of sympathy, if of anything, on our part, not of want of interest, that you have a right to complain. Never, within my memory, have the hearts of Englishmen been so deeply moved by any foreign struggle as by this civil war,--not even, if I recollect aright, by the great European earthquake of 1848. I doubt whether they were more moved by the Indian mutiny or by our war with Russia. It seemed that history had brought round again the great crisis of the Thirty Years' War, when all England throbbed with the mortal struggle waged between the powers of Liberty and Slavery on their German battle-field; for expectation can scarcely have been more intense when Gustavus and Tilly were approaching each other at Leipsic than it was when Meade and Lee were approaching each other at Gettysburg. Severed from us by the Atlantic, while other nations are at our door, you are still nearer to us than all the world beside.

It is of want of sympathy, not of want of interest, that you have to complain. And the sympathy which has been withheld is not that of the whole nation, but that of certain classes, chiefly of the class against whose political interest you are fighting, and to whom your victory brings eventual defeat. The real origin of your nation is the key to the present relations between you and the different parties in England. This is the old battle waged again on a new field. We will not talk too much of Puritans and Cavaliers. The soldiers of the Union are not Puritans, neither are the planters Cavaliers, But the present civil war is a vast episode in the same irrepressible conflict between Aristocracy and Democracy; and the heirs of the Cavalier in England sympathize with your enemies, the heirs of the Puritan with you.

The feeling of our aristocracy, as of all aristocracies, is against you. It does not follow, nor do I believe, that as a body they would desire or urge their Government to do you a wrong, whatever spirit may be shown by a few of the less 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 personal hatred. An American going among them even now meets with nothing but personal courtesy and kindness. Under ordinary circumstances they are not indifferent to your good-will, nor unconscious of the tie of blood. But to ask them entirely to forget their order would be too much. In the success of a commonwealth founded on social and political equality all aristocracies must read their doom. Not by arms, but by example, you are a standing menace to the existence of political privilege. And the thread of that existence is frail. Feudal antiquity holds life by a precarious tenure amidst the revolutionary tendencies of this modern world. It has gone hard with the aristocracies throughout Europe of late years, though the French Emperor, as the head of the Reaction, may create a mock nobility round his upstart throne. The Roman aristocracy was an aristocracy of arms and law. The feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages was an aristocracy of arms and in some measure of law; it served the cause of political progress in its hour and after its kind; it confronted tyrannical kings when the people were as yet too weak to confront them; it conquered at Runnymede, as well as at Hastings. But the aristocracies of modern Europe are aristocracies neither of arms nor of law. They are aristocracies of social and political privilege alone. They owe, and are half conscious that they owe, their present existence only to factitious weaknesses of human nature, and to the antiquated terrors of communities long kept in leading-strings and afraid to walk alone. If there were nothing but reason to dispel them, these fears might long retain their sway over European society. But the example of a great commonwealth flourishing here without a privileged class, and of a popular sovereignty combining order with progress, tends, however remotely, to break the spell. Therefore, as a class, the English nobility cannot desire the success of your Republic. Some of the order there are who have hearts above their coronets, as there are some kings who have hearts above their crowns, and who in this great crisis of humanity forget that they are noblemen, and remember that they are men. But the order, as a whole, has been against you, and has swayed in the same direction all who were closely connected with it or dependent on it. It could not fail to be against you, if it was for itself. Be charitable to the instinct of self-preservation. It is strong, sometimes violent, in us all.

In truth, it is rather against the Liberals of England than against you that the feeling of our aristocracy is directed. Liberal leaders have made your name odious by pointing to your institutions as the condemnation of our own. They did this too indiscriminately perhaps, while in one respect your institutions were far below our own, inasmuch as you were a slaveholding nation. "Look," they were always saying, "at the Model Republic,--behold its unbroken prosperity, the harmony of its people under the system of universal suffrage, the lightness of its taxation,--behold, above all, its immunity from war!" All this is now turned upon us as a taunt; but the taunt implies rather a sense of escape on the part of those who utter it than malignity, and the answer to it is victory.

What has been said of our territorial aristocracy may be said of our commercial aristocracy, which is fast blending with the territorial into a government of wealth. This again is nothing new. History can point to more cases than one in which the sympathies of rich men have been regulated by their riches. The Money Power has been cold to your cause throughout Europe,--perhaps even here. In all countries great capitalists are apt to desire that the laborer should be docile and contented, that popular education should not be carried dangerously high, that the right relations between capital and 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 capitalist the slave of the laborer, but by establishing between them mutual good-will, founded on intelligence and justice.

And let the upper classes of England have their due. The Lancashire operatives have been upon the other side; yet not the less have they received ready and generous help in their distress from all ranks and orders in the land.

It would be most unworthy of a student of history to preach vulgar hatred of an historic aristocracy. The aristocracy of 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, duly educated, to govern themselves without the control of an hereditary order. The progress of opinion in England will in time do the rest. War, forced by you upon the English nation, would only strengthen the worst part of the English aristocracy in the worst way, by bringing our people into collision with a Democracy, and by giving the ascendancy, as all wars not carried on for a distinct moral object do, to military passions over political aspirations. Our war with the French Republic threw back our internal reforms, which till then had been advancing, for a whole generation. Even the pockets of our land-owners would not suffer, but gain, by the war; for their rents would be raised by the exclusion of your corn, and the price of labor would be lowered by the stoppage of emigration. The suffering 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.