Chapter 19

I might mention other eccentricities of opinion quite distinct from the general temper of the English nation, such as that of the ultra-scientific school, which thinks it unscientific philanthropy to ascribe the attributes of humanity to the negro,--a school some of the more rampant absurdities of which had, just before I left England, called down the rebuke of real science in the person of Mr. Huxley. And I might note, if the time would allow, many fluctuations and oscillations which have taken place among our organs of opinion as the struggle went on. But I must say on the whole, both with reference to our different classes and with reference to our literature, that, considering the complexity of the case, the distance from which our people viewed it, and the changes which it has undergone since the war broke out, I do not think there is much room for disappointment as to the sympathies of our people. Parties have been divided on this question much as they are on great questions among ourselves, and much as they were in the time of Charles I., when this long strife began. The England of Charles and Laud has been against you: the England of Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell has in the main been on your side.

I say there has not been much ground for disappointment: I do not say there has been none. England at present is not in her noblest mood. She is laboring under a reaction which extends over France and great part of Europe, and which furnishes the key at this moment to the state of European affairs. This movement, like all great movements, reactionary or progressive, is complex in its nature. In the political sphere it presents itself as the lassitude and despondency which, as usual, have ensued after great political efforts, such as were made by the Continental nations in the abortive revolutions of 1848, and by England in a less degree in the struggle for Parliamentary Reform. In the religious sphere it presents itself in an analogous shape: there, lassitude and despondency have succeeded to the efforts of the religious intellect to escape from the decaying creeds of the old State Churches and push forward to a more enduring faith; and the priest as well as the despot has for a moment resumed his sway--though not his uncontested sway--over our weariness and our fears. The moral sentiment, after high tension, has undergone a corresponding relaxation. All liberal measures are for the time at a discount. The Bill for the Abolition of Church-Rates, once carried in the House of Commons by large majorities, is now lost. The nominal leaders of the Liberal party themselves have let their principles fall into abeyance, and almost coalesced with their Tory opponents. The Whig nobles who carried the Reform Bill have owned once more the bias of their order, and become determined, though covert, enemies of Reform. The ancient altars are sought again for the sake of peace by fainting spirits and perplexed minds; and again, as after our Reformation, as after our great Revolution, we see a number of conversions to the Church of Rome. On the other hand, strange physical superstitions, such as mesmerism and spirit-rapping, have crept, like astrology under the Roman Empire, into the void left by religious faith. Wealth has been pouring into England, and luxury with wealth. Our public journals proclaim, as you may perhaps have seen, that the society of our capital is unusually corrupt. The comic as well as the serious signs of the reaction appear everywhere. A tone of affected cynicism pervades a portion of our high intellect; and a pretended passion for prize-fighting shows that men of culture are weary of civilization, and wish to go back to barbarism for a while. The present head of the Government in England is not only the confederate, but the counterpart, of the head of the French Empire; and the rule of each denotes the temporary ascendancy of the same class of motives in their respective nations. An English Liberal is tempted to despond, when he compares the public life of England in the time of Pym and Hampden with our public life now. But there is greatness still in the heart of the English nation.

And you, too, have you not known in the course of your history a slack-tide of faith, a less aspiring hour? Have not you, too, known a temporary ascendancy of material over spiritual interests, a lowering of the moral tone, a readiness, for the sake of ease and peace and secure enjoyment, to compromise with evil? Have not you, too, felt the tyranny of wealth, putting the higher motives for a moment under its feet? What else has brought these calamities upon you? What else bowed your necks to the yoke which you are now breaking at so great a cost? Often and long in the life of every nation, though the tide is still advancing, the wave recedes. Often and long the fears of man overcome his hopes; but in the end the hopes of man overcome his fears. Your regeneration, when it is achieved, will set forward the regeneration of the European nations. It is the function which all nations, which all men, in their wavering progress towards perfection, perform in turn for each other.

This temporary lowering of the moral tone in English society has extended to the question of Slavery. It has deadened our feelings on that subject, though I hope without shaking our principles. You ask whether England can have been sincere in her enmity to Slavery, when she refuses sympathy to you in your struggle with the Slave Power. Talleyrand, cynic as he was, knew that she was sincere, though he said that not a man in France thought so but himself. She redeemed her own slaves with a great price. She sacrificed her West-Indian interest. She counts that achievement higher than her victories. She spends annually much money and many lives and risks much enmity in her crusade against the slave-trade. When your Southern statesmen have tried to tamper with her, they have found her true. If they had bid us choose between a concession to their designs and war, all aristocratic as we are, we should have chosen war. Every Englishman who takes the Southern side is compelled by public opinion to preface his advocacy with a disclaimer of all sympathy with Slavery. The agent of the slave-owners in England, Mr. Spence, pleads their cause to the English people on the ground of gradual emancipation. Once the "Times" ventured to speak in defence of Slavery, and the attempt was never made again. The principle, I say, holds firm among the mass of the people; but on this, as on other moral questions, we are not in our noblest mood.

In justice to my country, however, let me remind you that you did not--perhaps you could not--set the issue between Freedom and Slavery plainly before 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, notwithstanding your change,--a change which they imagined to be wrought merely by expediency,--they retained their first impression as to the object of the war, an impression which the advocates of the South used every art to perpetuate in their minds. That the opponents of Slavery in England should desire the restoration of the Union with Slavery, and with Slavery strengthened, as they expected it would be, by new concessions, was what you could not reasonably expect. And remember--I say it not with any desire to trench on American politics or to pass judgment on American parties--that the restoration of the Union with Slavery is what a large section of your people, and one of the candidates for your Presidency, are in fact ready to embrace now.

Had you been able to say plainly at the outset that you were fighting against Slavery, the English people would scarcely have given ear to the cunning fiction of Mr. Spence. It would scarcely have been brought to believe that this great contest was only about a Tariff. It would have seen that the Southern planter, if he was a Free-Trader, was a Free-Trader not from enlightenment, but because from the degradation of labor in his dominions he had no manufactures to support; and that he was in fact a protectionist of his only home production which feared competition,--the home-bred slave. I have heard Mr. Spence's book called the most successful lie in history. Very successful it certainly was, and its influence in misleading England ought not to be overlooked. It was written with great skill, and it came out just at the right time, before people had formed their opinions, and when they were glad to have a theory presented to their minds. But its success would have been short-lived, had it not received what seemed authoritative confirmation from the language of statesmen here.

I might mention many other things which have influenced opinion in the wrong way: the admiration felt by our people, and, to your honor, equally felt by you, for the valor and self-devotion which have been shown by the Southerners, and which, when they have submitted to the law, will entitle them to be the fellow-citizens of freemen; a careless, but not ungenerous, sympathy for that which, by men ignorant of the tremendous strength of a Slave Power, was taken to be the weaker side; the doubt really, and, considering the conflict of opinion here, not unpardonably, entertained as to the question of State Sovereignty and the right of Secession. All these motives, though they operate against your cause, are different from hatred of you. But there are two points to which in justice to my country I must especially call attention.

The first is this,--that you have not yourselves been of one mind in this matter, nor has the voice of your own people been unanimous. No English speaker or journal has denounced the war or reviled the conduct of your Government more bitterly than a portion of American politicians and a section of the American press. The worst things said in England of your statesmen, of your generals, of your armies, of your contractors, of your social state and character as a people, have been but the echo of things which have been said here. If the New-York correspondents of some English journals have been virulent and calumnious, their virulence and their calumnies have been drawn, to a great extent, from the American circles in which they have lived. No slanders poured by English ignorance or malevolence on American society have been so foul as those which came from a renegade American writing in one of our Tory journals under the name of "Manhattan." No lamentations over the subversion of the Constitution and the destruction of personal liberty have been louder than those of your own Opposition. The chief enemies of your honor have been those of your own household. The crime of a great mass of our people against you has, in fact, consisted in believing statements about America made by men whom they knew to be Americans, and did not know to be disloyal to the cause of their country. I have seen your soldiers described in an extract from one of your own journals as jail-birds, vagabonds, and foreigners. I have seen your President accused of wishing to provoke riots in New York that he might have a pretence for exercising military power. I have seen him accused of sending to the front, to be thinned, a regiment which was likely to vote against him. I have seen him accused of decoying his political opponents into forging soldiers' votes in order to discredit them. What could the "Times" itself say more?

The second point is this. Some of your journals did their best to prevent our people from desiring your success by declaring that your success would be followed by aggression on us. The drum, like strong wine, is apt to get into weak heads, especially when they are unaccustomed to the sound. An Englishman coming among you is soon assured that you do not wish to attack Canada. Apart from considerations of morality and honor, he finds every man of sense here aware that extent of territory is your danger, if you wish to be one nation,--and further, that freedom of development, and not procrustean centralization, is the best thing for the New as well as for the Old World. But the mass of our people have not been among you; nor do they know that the hot words sedulously repeated to them by our Southern press are not authentic expressions of your designs. They are doubly mistaken,--mistaken both in thinking that you wish to seize Canada, and in thinking that a division of the Union into two hostile nations, which would compel you to keep a standing army, would render you less dangerous to your neighbors. But your own demagogues are the authors of the error; and the Monroe doctrine and the Ostend manifesto are still ringing in our ears. I am an adherent of the Monroe doctrine, if it means, as it did on the lips of Canning, that the reactionary influence of the old European Governments is not to be allowed to mar the hopes of man in the New World; but if it means violence, every one must be against it who respects the rights of nations. When you contrast the feelings of England towards you with those of other nations, Italy for example, you must remember that Italy has no Canada. I hope Canada will soon cease to be a cause of mistrust between us. The political dominion of England over it, since it has had a free constitution of its own, has dwindled to a mere thread. It is as ripe to be a nation as these Colonies were on the eve of the American Revolution. As a dependency, it is of no solid value to England since she has ceased to engross the Colonial trade. It distracts her forces, and prevents her from acting with her full weight in the affairs of her own quarter of the world. It belongs in every sense to America, not to Europe; and its peculiar institutions--its extended suffrage, its freedom from the hereditary principle, its voluntary system in religion, its common schools--are opposed to those of England, and identical with those of the neighboring States. All this the English nation is beginning to feel; and it has tried in the case of the Ionian Islands the policy of moderation, and found that it raises, instead of lowering, our solid reputation and our real power. The confederation which is now in course of formation between the North-American Colonies tends manifestly to a further change; it tends to a further change all the more manifestly because such a tendency is anxiously disclaimed. Yes, Canada will soon cease to trouble and divide us. But while it is England's, it is England's; and to threaten her with an attack on it is to threaten a proud nation with outrage and an assault upon its honor.

Finally, if our people have misconstrued your acts, let me conjure you to make due allowance for our ignorance,--an ignorance which, in many cases, is as dark as night, but which the progress of events here begins gloriously to dispel. We are not such a nation of travellers as you are, and scarcely one Englishman has seen America for a hundred Americans that have seen England. "Why does not Beauregard fly to the assistance of Lee?" said a highly educated Englishman to an American in England. "Because," was the reply, "the distance is as great as it is from Rome to Paris." If these three thousand miles of ocean that lie between us could be removed for a few days, and the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race could look each other in the face, and speak their minds to each other, there would be an end, I believe, of all these fears. When an Englishman and an American meet, in this country or in England, they are friends, notwithstanding all that has passed; why not the two nations?

I have not presumed, and shall not presume, to touch on any question that has arisen or may arise between the Executive Government of my country and the Executive Government of yours. In England, Liberals have not failed to plead for justice to you, and, as we thought, at the same time, for the maintenance of English honor. But I will venture to make, in conclusion, one or two brief remarks as to the general temper in which these questions should be viewed.

In the first place, when great and terrible issues hang upon our acts, perhaps upon our words, let us control our fancies and distinguish realities from fictions. There hangs over every great struggle, and especially over every civil war, a hot and hazy atmosphere of excited feeling which is too apt to distort all objects to the view. In the French Revolution, men were suspected of being objects of suspicion, and sent to the guillotine for that offence. The same feverish and delirious fancies prevailed as to the conduct of other nations. All the most natural effects of a violent revolution--the depreciation of the assignats, the disturbance of trade, the consequent scarcity of food--were ascribed by frantic rhetoricians to the guineas of Pitt, whose very limited amount of secret-service money was quite inadequate to the performance of such wonders. When a foreign nation has given offence, it is turned by popular imagination into a fiend, and its fiendish influence is traced with appalling clearness in every natural accident that occurs. I have heard England accused of having built the Chicago Wigwam, with the building of which she had as much to do as with the building of the Great Pyramid. I have heard it insinuated that her policy was governed by her share in the Confederate Cotton-Loan. The Confederate Cotton-Loan is, I believe, four millions and a half. There is an English nobleman whose estates are reputed to be worth a larger sum. "She is very great," says a French writer, "that odious England." Odious she may be, but she is great,--too great to be bribed to baseness by a paltry fee.

In the second place, let us distinguish hostile acts, of which an account must of course be demanded, from mere words, which great nations, secure of their greatness, may afford to let pass. Your President knows the virtue of silence; but silence is so little the system on either side of the water, that in the general flux of rhetoric some rash things are sure to be said. One of our statesmen, while starring it in the Provinces, carelessly throws out the expression that Jeff Davis has made the South a nation; another says that you are fighting for Empire, and the South for Independence. Our Prime-Minister is sometimes offensive in his personal bearing towards you,--as, to our bitter cost, he has often been towards other nations. On the other hand, your statesmen have said hard things of England; and one of your ambassadors to a great Continental state published, not in his private, but in his official capacity, language which made the Northern party in England for a moment hang their heads with shame. A virulence, discreditable to England, has at times broken forth in our House of Commons,--as a virulence, not creditable to this country, has at times broken forth in your Congress. But what has the House of Commons done? Threatening motions were announced in favor of Recognition,--in defence of the Confederate rams. They were all set aside by the good sense of the House and of the nation. It ended in a solemn farce,--in the question being put very formally to the Government whether it intended to recognize the Confederate States, to which the Government replied that it did not.

And when the actions of our Government are in question, fair allowance must be made for the bad state of International Law. The very term itself is, in fact, as matters at present stand, a dangerous fiction. There can be no law, in a real sense, where there is no law-giver, no tribunal, no power of giving legal effect to a sentence,--but where the party on whose side the law is held to be must after all be left to do himself right with the strong hand. And one consequence is that governments are induced to rest in narrow technicalities, and to be ruled by formal precedents, when the question ought to be decided on the broadest grounds of right. The decision of Lord Stowell, for example, that it is lawful for the captor to burn an enemy's vessel at sea rather than suffer her to escape, though really applying only to a case of special necessity, has been supposed to cover a system of burning prizes at sea, which is opposed to the policy and sentiment of all civilized nations, and which Lord Stowell never could have had in view. And it must be owned that this war, unexampled in all respects, has been fruitful of novel questions respecting belligerent rights, on which a Government meaning no evil might easily be led astray. Among its results we may hope that this revolution will give birth to a better system of International Law. Would there were reason to hope that it might lead to the erection of some high tribunal of justice among nations to supersede forever the dreadful and uncertain ordeal of war! Has the Government of England, in any case where your right was clear, really done you a wrong? If it has, I trust that the English nation, temperately and respectfully approached, as a proud nation requires to be, will surely constrain its Government to make the reparation which becomes its honor.

But let it not be forgotten, that, in the worst of times, at the moment of your lowest depression, England has refused to recognize the Confederate States, or in any way to interfere in their behalf; and that the steadiness of this refusal has driven the Confederate envoy, Mr. Mason, to seek what he deems a more hospitable shore. The inducement of cotton for our idle looms and our famishing people has been a strong one to our statesmen as well as to our people, and the Tempter has been at their side. Despotism, like Slavery, is necessarily propagandist. It cannot bear the contagion, it cannot bear the moral rebuke, of neighboring freedom. The new French satrapy in Mexico needs some more congenial and some weaker neighbor than the United Republic, and we have had more than one intimation that this need is felt.