Chapter VIII: Part 8

On this last point, of inebriation, this is certainly a wonderful camp. For us, it is absolutely omitted from the list of vices. I have never heard of a glass of liquor in the camp, nor of any effort either to bring it in or to keep it out. A total absence of the circulating-medium might explain the abstinence,--not that it seems to have that effect with white soldiers,--but it would not explain the silence. The craving for tobacco is constant and not to be allayed, like that of a mother for her children; but I have never heard whiskey even wished for, save on Christmas Day, and then only by one man, and he spoke with a hopeless ideal sighing, as one alludes to the Golden Age. I am amazed at this total omission of the most inconvenient of all camp-appetites. It certainly is not the result of exhortation, for there has been no occasion for any, and even the pledge would scarcely seem efficacious where hardly anybody can write.

I do not think there is a great visible eagerness for to-morrow's festival: it is not their way to be very jubilant over anything this side of the New Jerusalem. They know also that those in this Department are nominally free already, and that the practical freedom has to be maintained, in any event, by military success. But they will enjoy it greatly, and we shall have a multitude of people.

* * * * *

_January 1, 1863_ (evening).

A happy New-Year to civilized, people,--mere white folks. Our festival has come and gone, with perfect success, and our good General has been altogether satisfied. Last night the great fires were kept smouldering in the pits, and the beeves were cooked more or less, chiefly more,--during which time they had to be carefully watched, and the great spits turned by main force. Happy were the merry fellows who were permitted to sit up all night, and watch the glimmering flames that threw a thousand fantastic shadows among the great gnarled oaks. And such a chattering as I was sure to hear, whenever I awoke, that night!

My first greeting to-day was from one of the most stylish sergeants, who approached me with the following little speech, evidently the result of some elaboration:--

"I tink myself happy, dis New-Year's Day, for salute my own Cunnel. Dis day las' year I was servant to a Cunnel ob Secesh; but now I hab de privilege for salute my own Cunnel."

That officer, with the utmost sincerity, reciprocated the sentiment.

About ten o'clock the people began to collect by land, and also by water,--in steamers sent by General Saxton for the purpose; and from that time all the avenues of approach were thronged. The multitude were chiefly colored women, with gay handkerchiefs on their heads, and a sprinkling of men, with that peculiarly respectable look which these people always have on Sundays and holidays. There were many white visitors also,--ladies on horseback and in carriages, superintendents and teachers, officers and cavalry-men. Our companies were marched to the neighborhood of the platform, and allowed to sit or stand, as at the Sunday services; the platform was occupied by ladies and dignitaries, and by the band of the Eighth Maine, which kindly volunteered for the occasion; the colored people filled up all the vacant openings in the beautiful grove around, and there was a cordon of mounted visitors beyond. Above, the great live-oak branches and their trailing moss; beyond the people, a glimpse of the blue river.

The services began at half-past eleven o'clock, with prayer by our chaplain, Mr. Fowler, who is always, on such occasions, simple, reverential, and impressive. Then the President's Proclamation was read by Dr. W. H. Brisbane, a thing infinitely appropriate, a South-Carolinian addressing South-Carolinians; for he was reared among these very islands, and here long since emancipated his own slaves. Then the colors were presented to us by the Rev. Mr. French, a chaplain who brought them from the donors in New York. All this was according to the programme. Then followed an incident so simple, so touching, so utterly unexpected and startling, that I can scarcely believe it on recalling, though it gave the key-note to the whole day. The very moment the speaker had ceased, and just as I took and waved the flag, which now for the first time meant anything to these poor people, there suddenly arose, close beside the platform, a strong male voice, (but rather cracked and elderly,) into which two women's voices instantly blended, singing, as if by an impulse that could no more be repressed than the morning note of the song-sparrow,--

"My Country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing!"

People looked at each other, and then at us on the platform, to see whence came, this interruption, not set down in the bills. Firmly and irrepressibly the quavering voices sang on, verse after verse; others of the colored people joined in; some whites on the platform began, but I motioned them to silence. I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. Nothing could be more wonderfully unconscious; art could not have dreamed of a tribute to the day of jubilee that should be so affecting; history will not believe it; and when I came to speak of it, after it was ended, tears were everywhere. If you could have heard how quaint and innocent it was! Old Tiff and his children might have sung it; and close before me was a little slave-boy, almost white, who seemed to belong to the party, and even he must join in. Just think of it!--the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people, and here, while mere spectators stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words, these simple souls burst out in their lay, as if they were by their own hearths at home! When they stopped, there was nothing to do for it but to speak, and I went on; but the life of the whole day was in those unknown people's song.

Receiving the flags, I gave them into the hands of two fine-looking men, jet-black, as color-guard, and they also spoke, and very effectively,--Sergeant Prince Rivers and Corporal Robert Sutton. The regiment sang "Marching Along," and then General Saxton spoke, in his own simple, manly way, and Mrs. Frances D. Gage spoke very sensibly to the women, and Judge Stickney, from Florida, added something; then some gentlemen sang an ode, and the regiment the John Brown song, and then they went to their beef and molasses. Everything was very orderly, and they seemed to have a very gay time. Most of the visitors had far to go, and so dispersed before dress-parade, though the band stayed to enliven it. In the evening we had letters from home, and General Saxton had a reception at his house, from which I excused myself; and so ended one of the most enthusiastic and happy gatherings I ever knew. The day was perfect, and there was nothing but success.

I forgot to say, that, in the midst, of the services, it was announced that General Fremont was appointed Commander-in-Chief,--an announcement which was received with immense cheering, as would have been almost anything else, I verily believe, at that moment of high-tide. It was shouted across by the pickets above,--a way in which we often receive news, but not always trustworthy.

FOOTNOTES:

[B] A second winter's experience removed all this solicitude, for they learned to take care of themselves. During the first February the sick-list averaged about ninety, during the second about thirty,--this being the worst month in the year, for blacks. Charity ought, perhaps, to withhold the information that during the first winter we had three surgeons, and during the second only one.

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 subject, 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 political 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 habits 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 hearers 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 pride did not suffer to sleep, and which sometimes galled a haughty nation little patient of defeat. In more recent times there had been a number of disputes, the more angry because they were between brethren. There had been disputes about boundaries, 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 fact, 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 towards us the spirit which Slavery does not fail to engender in the domestic tyrant; while, perhaps, some of our statesmen had been too ready to presume 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 Republic 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 privy to recruiting in your territories. The fault was acknowledged; but the matter was pressed by your Government in a temper which we thought showed a desire to humiliate, and a want of that readiness 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 criticism of English writers, who visited a new country without the spirit of philosophic inquiry, and who in collecting materials for the amusement of their countrymen sometimes showed themselves a little wanting 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 quarters 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 forbidden to flow. It was a gain, as it put an end to an obsolete tutelage, which tended to prevent America from learning betimes to walk alone, while it gave England the puerile and somewhat dangerous pleasure of reigning 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 them, into your quarrels at the price of undertaking their defence. The inauguration of free trade was in fact 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 kindness 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 ourselves; 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 history 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 wound 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.

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 belief 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 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.

I have spoken of our commercial aristocracy generally. Liverpool demands 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 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 political and social questions,--literature,--even religious thought,--something of that high aspiring spirit which made commerce noble in the old English 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, perhaps, 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 connected 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, contaminated by intercourse with the slave-owner, regardless of the honor and interest of their country, ready to plunge two kindred nations into a desolating war, if they can only secure the profits of their own trade. England must own that she has produced such men; but does this disgrace attach to her alone?

The clergy of the State Church, like the aristocracy, have probably been as a body against you in this struggle. In their case too, not hatred of America, but the love of their own institution, is the cause. If you are a standing menace to aristocracies, 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 outward 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 deprived of State support must fall, when I see it without 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 fact? Already the State Churches of Europe are placed in imminent peril by the controversies 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 Palmerston to ask for intervention in company with Lord Clanricarde and Mr. Spence. You express surprise that the son of Wilberforce is not with you; but Wilberforce was not, like 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, comprising the wealthier tradesmen, forms a sort of minor aristocracy in itself, with a good deal of aristocratic 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. Is 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 independence and servility. In that long course of concessions by which your politicians strove--happily for the world and for yourselves they strove in vain--to conciliate the slave owning aristocracy of the South, 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-Conformists 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 struggle against 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 address to your Government and people.

And as to the middle classes generally, upper or lower, I see no reason to think that they are wanting 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 to have completely broken down. I believed as fully as any one, that the task which you had undertaken was hopeless, and that you were rushing on your ruin. I dreaded the effect on your Constitution, fearing, as others did, that civil war would bring you to anarchy, and anarchy to military despotism. 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 institutions which 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 maintain 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 passions which it kindles, as well as in the blood which it sheds,--terrible in its present effects, 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 yourselves,--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, because at present the greater part of them are without 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 to a political question. They never read a newspaper. They are absorbed in the struggle for daily bread, of which they have barely enough for themselves 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-will. 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 working-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 doubtful form. They have followed your wavering fortunes 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 before 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 present 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 orator, you would have known that you were not without sympathy in England,--not without sympathy such as those who look rather to the worth of a friend than to his rank may most dearly prize. Again I was 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 famine, 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 received 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 war paralyzed their industry, brought ruin into their houses, deprived them and their families 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 aristocracy 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.