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.
When England in the mass is spoken of as your enemy on this occasion, the London "Times" is taken for the voice of the country. The "Times" was in former days a great popular organ. It led vehemently and even violently the struggle for Parliamentary Reform. In that way it made its fortune; and having made its fortune, it takes part with the rich. Its proprietor in those days was a man with many faults, but he was a man of the people. Aristocratic society disliked and excluded him; he lived at war with it to the end. Affronted by the Whigs, he became in a certain sense a Tory; but he united his Toryism with Chartism, and was sent to Parliament for Nottingham by Tories and Chartists combined. The opposition of his journal to our New Poor-Law evinced, though in a perverse way, his feeling for the people. But his heir, the present proprietor, was born in the purple. He is a wealthy landed gentleman. He sits in Parliament for a constituency of landlords. He is thought to have been marked out for a peerage. It is accusing him of no crime to suppose, that, so far as he controls the "Times," it takes the bias of his class, and that its voice, if it speaks his sentiments, is not that of the English people, but of a rich conservative squire.
The editor is distinct from the proprietor, but his connections are perhaps still more aristocratic. A good deal has been said among us of late about his position. Before his time our journalism was not only anonymous, but impersonal. The journalist wore the mask not only to those whom he criticized, but to all the world. The present editor of the "Times" wears the mask to the objects of his criticism, but drops it, as has been remarked in Parliament, in "the gilded saloons" of rank and power. Not content to remain in the privacy which protected the independence of his predecessors, he has come forth in his own person to receive the homage of the great world. That homage has been paid in no stinted measure, and, as the British public has been apprised in rather a startling manner, with a somewhat intoxicating effect. The lords of the Money Power, the thrones and dominions of Usury, have shown themselves as assiduous as ministers and peers; and these potentates happen, like the aristocracy, to be unfriendly to your cause. Caressed by peers and millionnaires, the editor of the "Times" could hardly fail to express the feelings of peers and millionnaires towards a Republic in distress. We may be permitted to think that he has rather overacted his part. English peers, after all, are English gentlemen; and no English gentleman would deliberately sanction the torrent of calumny and insult which the "Times" has poured upon this nation. There are penalties for common offenders: there are none for those who scatter firebrands among nations. But the "Times" will not come off unscathed. It must veer with victory. And its readers will be not only prejudiced, but idiotic, if it does not in the process leave the last remnant of its authority behind.
Two things will suffice to mark the real political position of the "Times." You saw that a personal controversy was going on the other day between its editor and Mr. Cobden. That controversy arose out of a speech made by Mr. Bright, obliquely impugning the aristocratic law of inheritance, which is fast accumulating the land of England in a few hands, and disinheriting the English people of the English soil. For this offence Mr. Bright was assailed by the "Times" with calumnies so outrageous that Mr. Cobden could not help springing forward to vindicate his friend. The institution which the "Times" so fiercely defended on this occasion against a look which threatened it with alteration is vital and sacred in the eyes of the aristocracy, but is not vital or sacred in the eyes of the whole English nation. Again, the "Times" hates Garibaldi; and its hatred, generally half smothered, broke out in a loud cry of exultation when the hero fell, as it hoped forever, at Aspromonte. But the English people idolize Garibaldi, and receive him with a burst of enthusiasm unexampled in fervor. The English people love Garibaldi, and Garibaldi's name is equally dear to all American hearts. Is not this—let me ask in passing—a proof that there is a bond of sympathy, after all, between the English people and you, and that, if as a nation we are divided from you, it is not by a radical estrangement, but by some cloud of error which will in time pass away?
The wealth of the "Times," the high position which it has held since the period when it was the great Liberal journal, the clever writing and the early intelligence which its money and its secret connections with public men enable it to command, give it a circulation and an influence beyond the class whose interests it represents. But it has been thrust from a large part of its dominion by the cheap London and local press. It is exceeded in circulation more than twofold by the London "Telegraph," a journal which, though it has been against the war, has, I think, by no means shown in its leading articles the same spirit of hostility to the American people. The London "Star," which is strongly Federal, is also a journal of wide circulation. The "Daily News" is a high-priced paper, circulating among the same class as the "Times"; its circulation is comparatively small, but it is on the increase, and the journal, I have reason to believe, is prosperous. The Manchester "Examiner and Times," again,—a great local paper of the North of England,—nearly equals the London "Times" in circulation, and is favorable to your cause. I live under the dominion of the London "Times," and I will not deny that it is a great power of evil. It will be a great power of evil indeed, if it succeeds in producing a fatal estrangement between two kindred nations. But no one who knows England, especially the northern part of England, in which Liberalism prevails, would imagine the voice of the "Times" to be that of the English people.
Of the part taken by the writers of England it would be rash to speak in general terms, Stuart Mill and Cairns have supported your cause as heartily as Cobden and Bright. I am not aware that any political or economical writer of equal eminence has taken the other side. The leading reviews and periodicals have exhibited, as might have been expected, very various shades of opinion; but, with the exception of the known organs of violent Toryism, they have certainly not breathed hatred of this nation. In those which specially represent our rising intellect, the intellect which will probably govern us ten years hence, I should say the preponderance of the writing had been on the Federal side. In the University of Oxford the sympathies of the High-Church clergy and of the young Tory gentry are with the South; but there is a good deal of Northern sentiment among the young fellows of our more liberal colleges, and generally in the more active minds. At the University Debating Club, when the question between the North and the South was debated, the vote, though I believe in a thin house, was in favor of the North. Four Professors are members of the Union and Emancipation Society. And if intellect generally has been somewhat coldly critical, I am not sure that it has departed from its true function. I am conscious myself that I may be somewhat under the dominion of my feelings, that I may be even something of a fanatic in this matter. There may be evil as well as good in the cause which, as the good preponderates, claims and receives the allegiance of my heart. In that case, intellect, in pointing out the evil, only does its duty.
One English writer has certainly raised his voice against you with characteristic vehemence and rudeness. As an historical painter and a humorist Carlyle has scarcely an equal: a new intellectual region seemed to open to me when I read his "French Revolution." But his philosophy, in its essential principle, is false. He teaches that the mass of mankind are fools,—that the hero alone is wise,—that the hero, therefore, is the destined master of his fellow-men, and that their only salvation lies in blind submission to his rule,—and this without distinction of time or circumstance, in the most advanced as well as in the most primitive ages of the world. The hero-despot can do no wrong. He is a king, with scarcely even a God above him; and if the moral law happens to come into collision with his actions, so much the worse for the moral law. On this theory, a Commonwealth such as yours ought not to exist; and you must not be surprised, if, in a fit of spleen, the great cynic grasps his club and knocks your cause on the head, as he thinks, with a single blow. Here is the end of an unsound, though brilliant theory,—a theory which had always latent in it the worship of force and fraud, and which has now displayed its tendency at once in the portentous defence of the robber-policy of Frederic the Great and in the portentous defence of the Slave Power. An opposite theory of human society is, in fact, finding its confirmation in these events,—that which tells us that we all have need of each other, and that the goal towards which society actually moves is not an heroic despotism, but a real community, in which each member shall contribute his gifts and faculties to the common store, and the common government shall become the work of all. For, if the victory in this struggle has been won, it has been won, not by a man, but by the nation; and that it has been won not by a man, but by the nation, is your glory and the pledge of your salvation. We have called for a Cromwell, and he has not come; he has not come, partly because Cromwells are scarce, partly, perhaps, because the personal Cromwell belonged to a different age, and the Cromwell of this age is an intelligent, resolute, and united people.
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.
And this suggests one closing word as to our blockade-running. Nothing done on our side, I should think, can have been more galling, as nothing has been so injurious to your success. For myself, in common with all who think as I do on these questions, I abhor the blockade-runners; I heartily wish that the curse of ill-gotten gain may rest on every piece of gold they make; and never did I feel less proud of my country than when, on my way hither, I saw those vessels in Halifax sheltered under English guns. But blockade-running is the law; it is the test, in fact, of an effective blockade. And Englishmen are the blockade-runners, not because England as a nation is your enemy, but because her merchants are more adventurous and her seamen more daring than those of any nation but your own. You, I suspect, would not be the least active of blockade-runners, if we were carrying on a blockade. The nearness of our fortresses at Halifax and Nassau to your shores, which makes them the haunt of blockade-runners, is not the result of malice, but of accident,—of most unhappy accident, as I believe. We have not planted them there for this purpose. They have come down to us among the general inheritance of an age of conquest, when aggression was thought to be strength and glory,—when all kings and nations were alike rapacious,—and when the prize remained with us, not because we were below our neighbors in morality, but because we were more resolute in council and mightier in arms. Our conquering hour was yours. You, too, were then English citizens. You welcomed the arms of Cromwell to Jamaica. Your hearts thrilled at the tidings of Blenheim and Ramillies, and exulted in the thunders of Chatham. You shared the laurels and the conquests of Wolfe. For you and with you we overthrew France and Spain upon this continent, and made America the land of the Anglo-Saxon race. Halifax will share the destinies of the North-American confederation,—destinies, as I said before, not alien to yours. Nassau is an appendage to our West-Indian possessions. Those possessions are and have long been, and been known to every reasoning Englishman to be, a mere burden to us. But we have been bound in honor and humanity to protect our emancipated slaves from a danger which lay near. An ocean of changed thought and feeling has rolled over the memory of this nation within the last three years. You forget that but yesterday you were the Great Slave Power.
You, till yesterday, were the great Slave Power. And England, with all her faults and shortcomings, was the great enemy of slavery. Therefore the slave-owners who had gained possession of your Government hated her, insulted her, tried to embroil you with her. They represented her, and I trust not without truth, as restlessly conspiring against the existence of their great institution. They labored, not in vain, to excite your jealousy of her maritime ambition, when, in enforcing the right of search and striving to put down the slave-trade, she was really obeying her conscience and the conscience of mankind. They bore themselves towards her in these controversies as they bore themselves towards you,—as their character compels them to bear themselves towards all whom they have to deal. Living in their own homes above law, the proclaimed doctrines of lawless aggression which alarmed and offended not England alone, but every civilized nation. And this, as I trust and believe, has been the main cause of the estrangement between us, so far as it has been an estrangement between the nations, not merely between certain sections and classes. It is a cause which will henceforth operate no more. A Scandinavian hero, as the Norse legend tells, waged a terrible combat through a whole night with the dead body of his brother-in-arms, animated by a Demon; but with the morning the Demon fled.
Other thoughts crowd upon my mind,—thoughts of what the two nations have been to each other in the past, thoughts of what they may yet be to each other in the future. But these thoughts will rise in other minds as well as in mine, if they are not stifled by the passion of the hour. If there is any question to be settled between us, let us settle it without disparagement to the just claims or the honor of either party, yet, if possible, as kindred nations. For if we do not, our posterity will curse us. A century hence, the passions which caused the quarrel will be dead, the black record of the quarrel will survive and be detested. Do what we will now, we shall not cancel the tie of blood, nor prevent it from hereafter asserting its undying power. The Englishmen of this day will not prevent those who come after them from being proud of England's grandest achievement, the sum of all her noblest victories,—the foundation of this the great Commonwealth of the New World. And you will not prevent the hearts of your children's children from turning to the birth-place of their nation, the land of their history and of their early greatness, the land which holds the august monuments of your ancient race, the works of your illustrious fathers, and their graves.
Goldwin Smith.
WE ARE A NATION.
The great national triumph we have just achieved renders that foggy and forlorn Second Tuesday of November the most memorable day of this most memorable year of the war. Under the heavy curtain of mist that brooded low over the scene, under the sombre clouds of uncertainty that hung drizzling and oppressive above the whole land, was enacted a drama whose grandeur has not been surpassed in history. The deep significance of that event it is not easy for the mind to fathom. As the accumulating majorities for the Union came rolling in, like billows succeeding billows, heaping up the waters of victory, it was not alone the ship of state that was lifted bodily over the bar, but all her costly freight of human liberties and human hopes was upborne, and floated some leagues onward towards the fair haven of the Future.
The first uprising of the nation, when its existence was assailed, was truly a sublime spectacle. But the last uprising of the same, to confirm with cool deliberation the judgment it pronounced in its heat, is a spectacle of far higher moral sublimity. That sudden wildfire-blaze of patriotism, if it was simply a blaze, had long since had time to expire. The Red Sea we had passed through was surely sufficient to quench any light flame kindled merely in the leaves and brushwood of our national character. Instead of a brisk and easy conquest of a rash rebellion, such as seemed at first to be pretty generally anticipated, we had closed with a powerful antagonist in a struggle which was all the more terrible because it was unforeseen. The country had soon digested its hot cakes of enthusiasm, and come to the tougher article, the ostrich-diet of iron determination. If we were a race of flunkies, ample opportunities had been afforded to have our flunky-ism whipped out of us. If Jonathan was but another blustering Sir Andrew Aguecheek, he would long before have elicited laughter from the world's aristocratic dress-circle, and split the ears of the groundlings, by turning from the foe that would fight, and bellowing forth that worthy gentleman's sentiments:—"An I thought he had been valiant, and so cunning in fence, I'd have seen him damned ere I'd have challenged him!" But those who looked hopefully for this conclusion have been disappointed. Even Mr. Carlyle may now perceive that we have something more than a foul chimney burning itself out over here:—strange that a seer should thus mistake the glare of a mountain-torch! We have not made war from a mere ebullition of spite, or as an experiment, or for any base and temporary purpose; but this is a war for humanity, and for all time. That we are in deadly earnest, that the heart of the nation is in it, and that this is no effervescent and fickle heart, the momentous Tuesday stands before the world as the final proof.
True, in that day's winnowing of the national grain, which had been some four years threshing, plenty of chaff and grit were found. The opposition to the Administration was made up of three classes. The smallest, but by far the most active class, consisted of reckless politicians,—those Northern men with Southern principles (if they have anything that can properly be called principles) who sympathize with the Rebels in arms,—who hold the interests of party to be supreme, and shrink from no acts that bid fair to advance those interests. They are the grit in the machine. The second class comprised the sheep which those bad shepherds led,—sheep with a large proportion of swine intermixed, and many a fanged and dangerous cur, as ignorant as they, doing the will of his masters,—the brutish class, without enlightenment or moral perception, goaded by prejudice, and deceived by lies so shallow and foolish that the wonder was how anybody could be duped by them. Side by side with these, and often mingling with them, was the third class, the so-called "Conservatives," whose numbers and respectability could alone have kept the warlike young Falstaff of the expedition in countenance, and induced him to march through Coventry (or rather into it, for he got no farther) with his motley crew of followers.
This last-named class, when analyzed, is found to be composed of a great variety of elements. The downright "Hunker" Conservative, who is very likely to pass over to and identify himself with the first class, hates with a natural, ineradicable hate all political and spiritual advancement. He takes material and selfish, and consequently low and narrow views of things,—and having secured for himself and his wife, for his son John and his wife, privilege to eat and sleep and cohabit, he cannot see the necessity of any further progress. If he is enterprising, it is to increase his blessings in this world; if devout, it is to perpetuate them in the next: for sincere religion he has none,—since religion is but another name for Love, inspiring hope, charity, and a zeal for the welfare of all mankind.—Others are conservative from timidity, or because they are wedded to tranquility. "Oh yes," they say, "no doubt the cause you are fighting for is just; but then fighting is so dreadful! Let us have peace,—peace at any cost!" Good-hearted people as far as they go, but lacking in constitution. To them the fiery torrents of generosity and heroism are unknown. Numbers of these, it is true, were swept away by the flood of enthusiasm which prevailed during the first days of the Rebellion; but when it appeared that the insurgents were not to be overawed and put down by noise,—that making speeches and hanging out flags would not do the business,—they became alarmed: the thought of actual bloodshed, and taxes, and a disturbance of trade developed the Aguecheek. "Good heavens!" said they, picking up the hats they has tossed with cheers into the sky, and carefully brushing down the ruffled nap to its former respectable smoothness, "this will never do! we can't frighten 'em!" So they concluded to be frightened themselves, and ran back to their comfortable apron-strings of opinion held by their grandmothers. Strange as it seems, many of these are persons of piety, taste, and culture. Yet their culture is retrospective, their taste mere dillettanteism, and their piety conventional: to whatever is new in theology, or vital in literature, (at least until the cobwebs of age begin to gather upon it,) and especially to whatever tends to overthrow or greatly modify the ancient order of things, they are unalterably opposed. If occasionally one of them becomes desirous of keeping up with the times, or is forced along momentarily by the stream of events, some defect of mental or moral constitution prevents his progress; and you are sure to find him soon or late returning to the point from which he started, like those bits of drift-wood which are always bobbing up and down close under the fall or circling round and round in the eddies. The trouble is, such sticks float too lightly on the surface of things; if they carried more heart-ballast, and would sink deeper, the current would bear them on.—Another variety of the Conservative is the man who is really progressive and right-minded, but extremely slow. Give him time, and he is certain to form a just judgment, and range himself on the right side at last. He goes with the rest only so far as they travel his road, and his lagging is pretty sure to be atoned for by earnest endeavor in the end. With these are to be classed numerous other varieties: those who are "Hunkerish" on account of some strange spiritual obtuseness, or from misanthropy, or perverseness, or self-conceit, or a cold and sluggish temperament, or from weak, human sympathies governed by strong political prejudice,—together with those countless larvæ and tadpoles, the small-fry of sons and nephews, of individuality yet undeveloped, who are conservative because their fathers and uncles are conservative.
Such was the Opposition, to which we have devoted so many words, because, though signally defeated, much of its power and influence survives. The fact that it proved to be as large as it was is by no means discouraging: that there should have been so much flabby and diseased flesh on the body-politic was to have been expected; and that it would show itself chiefly in the large cities, where foul humors and leprosy are sure to break out, if anywhere, upon slight irritation, (contrast the corrupt vote of New York City with Missouri and Maryland giving their voices for freedom!) was likewise foreseen. That the malady continues, and by what curative process it is to be subdued and rendered harmless,—this is what concerns us now.
We have at last demonstrated, to the satisfaction of our arrogant Southern friends, let us trust, that the despised Yankee, the dollar-worshipper, is as prompt to fight for a principle as they for power and a mistaken right of property,—ready to give blood and treasure without stint, all for an idea; and that, having reluctantly set his foot in gore, to draw back is not possible to him, for his heart is indomitable, and his soul relentless,—in his soul sits Nemesis herself. We have taught the slaveholding insolence the final lesson, that there is absolutely nothing to hope from the pusillanimity it counted upon. To the world abroad, also, that Tuesday's portentous snow-storm of ballots, covering every vestige of treason here, to the trail of the Copperhead, and whitening the face of the whole land with a purer faith, will be more convincing than our victories in the field. The bubble of Republicanism, which was to display such alacrity at bursting, is not the childish thing it was deemed, but granitic, with a fiery, throbbing core; its outward form no mere flashy film, blown out of chimeras and dreams, but a creation from the solid strata of human experience, upheaved here by the birth-throes of a new era:—
"With inward fires and pain,
It rose a bubble from the plain,"
secure and enduring as Monadnock or Mount Washington.
We have proved that we are a nation equal to the task of self-discipline and self-control,—a new thing on this planet. Hitherto, on the stage of history, kings and princes have been the star-actors: in them all the interest of the scene has centred: they and a few grand favorites were everything, and all the rest supernumeraries, "a level immensity of foolish small people," of no utility except to support them in their pompous parts. But we have found that "Hamlet" does very well with Hamlet left out. In place of the prince we will have a principle. Persons are of no account: the President is of no account simply as a man. Here, at last, Humanity has flowered; here has blossomed a new race of men, capable of postponing persons to uses, and private preferences to the public good, of subjecting its wildest passions to a sense of justice,—qualities so rare, that, when they are most strikingly manifested in us, foreign observers stand astonished and incredulous. Accustomed to seeing other races carried away by their own frenzy the moment they break free from despotic restraint and attempt to act for themselves, they cannot believe that Americans actually have that uncommon virtue, self-control. The predictions of the London "Times" with regard to us have always proved such ludicrous failures, because they have been based upon this false estimate of our temper. Taking for granted that we are a mob, and that a mob is an idiot, whose speech and actions are void of reason, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," the Thunderer continues to prophesy evil of us; and when, where madness was most confidently looked for, we exhibit the coolest sense, it can think of nothing better to do than to denounce us for our inconsistencies! Yet the self-control we claim for ourselves comes from no lack of caloric: caloric we possess in abundance, though of a stiller sort than that with which the world has been hitherto acquainted. Our friend from the backwoods thought there was no fire in the coal-furnace, because he could not hear it roar and crackle, and was afterwards amazed at its steady intensity of heat. Our misguided Southern brethren had the same opinion of Northern character, and burned their hands most deplorably when they laid hold of it.
They have discovered their mistake. Our Transatlantic neighbors have also, by this time, discovered theirs. Moreover, we (and this is the main thing) have caught a glimpse of ourselves in the glass of the last election. Henceforth let us have faith in our destiny. Let us once more open our maps, and, by the light of that day's revelation, look at the grand outlines and limitless possibilities of our country. Look at the old States and the new, and at the future States! Behold the vast plains of Texas and the Indian Territory,—the rivers of Arizona, Dakotah, and Utah,—Montana, Idaho, Colorado, and New Mexico, with their magnificent mountain-chains,—Nevada, and the Pacific States,—Washington, Oregon, and California, each alone capable of becoming another New England! What a home is this for the nation that is to be! Let us consider well our advantages, be true to the inspiration that is in us, put aside at once and forever the thought of failure, and advance with firm and confident steps to the accomplishment of the grandest mission ever yet intrusted to any people.
True, great humiliations may be still in store for us; for what do we not deserve? When we consider the inhumanity, the cowardice, the stolid selfishness, of which this people has been guilty, especially on the subject of negro slavery, we can find no refuge from despair but in the comforting assurance that God is a God of mercy, as well as of justice.
Let us hasten to atone for our sins, and forward the work of national purification, by doing our duty—our whole duty—now. One thing is certain: we cannot look for help to other nations, nor to the amiable disposition of a foe whose pith and pluck are consanguineous with our own, nor to the agency of individuals. It was written in the beginning that the people which aspired to make its own laws should also work out its own salvation. For this reason great leaders have not been given us, and we shall not need them. It is for a nation unstable in its purposes, and incapable of self-moderation, that the steady hand of a strong ruler is necessary. The first Napoleon was no more a natural product of the first French Revolution than the present Emperor is of the last. They might each have sat for the picture of the tyrant springing to the neck of an unbridled Democracy, drawn by Plato in the eighth book of the "Republic": just as his description of the excesses which necessitate despotic rule might pass for a description of the frenzy of 'Ninety-Three:—"When a State thirsts after liberty, and happens to have bad cup-bearers appointed it, and gets immoderately drunk with an unmixed draught, thereof, it punishes even the governors." No such inebriety has resulted from the moderate draughts of that nectar in which this new Western race has indulged; and only the southern and more passionate portion of it is in any danger of converting its acute "State-Rights" distemper into chronic despotism. The nation in its childhood needed a paternal Washington; but now it has arrived at manhood, and it requires, not a great leader, but a magistrate willing himself to be led. Such a man is Mr. Lincoln: an able, faithful, hard-working citizen, overseeing the affairs of all the citizens, accepting the guidance of Providence, and conscientiously yielding himself to be the medium of a people's will, the agent of its destinies. That is all we have any right to expect of him; and if we expect more, we shall be disappointed. He cannot stretch forth his hand and save us, although we have now twice elected him to his high place. Upon ourselves, and upon ourselves alone, under God, success and victory still depend.
What outward duties are to be fulfilled it is needless to recapitulate here,—for have they not been taught in every loyal pulpit and in every loyal print, in sermon, story, and song, until there is not a school-boy but knows the lesson? Treason must be defeated in the field, its armies annihilated, its power destroyed forever. In order to accomplish this, our own armies must be kept constantly recruited with numbers and with confidence. As for American slavery, it perishes from the face of the earth utterly. We have had enough of the serpent which the young Republic warmed in its too kind bosom. Now it dies; there is no help for it: if you object to the heel upon its head, and place your own head there to sheild it, God pity you, my friend, for you will have need of more than human pity! This war is to be brought to a triumphant close, and the cause of the war extirpated, whether you like it or not. You can accept destruction and ignominy with it, or you may live to rejoice over the most glorious victory and reform of the age: take your choice: but understand, once for all, that complaint is puerile, and expostulation but an idle wind in the face of inexorable Fate. Shall we remember our martyred heroes, our noble, our beloved, who have gone down in this conflict, and sit gloomily content while the devouring monster survives? Is it nothing that they have fallen, and yet such a wrong that the fetters of the bondman should fall? Is the claim of property in man so sacred, and the blood of our brothers so cheap? Have done with this heartless cant,—this prating about the constitutional rights of traitors! When the Moslem chief was marching to the chastisement of a revolted tribe, the insurgents, seeing disaster inevitable in a fair field, resorted to the device of elevating the Koran upon the shafts of their spears, and bearing it before them into battle. The stratagem succeeded. The fanatical Arabs were filled with horror on finding that they had lifted their swords against the Book of the Holy Prophet, and fled in confusion,—defeated, not by the foe, but by their own blind reverence for the letter and outward symbol of the Law. Thus the first attempt at secession from the Moslem Empire became successful; and the decadence of that empire was the fatal fruit of that day's folly. In like manner we have had the letter of the Constitution thrust between us and victory. The leaders of the Opposition carried it before them, with ostentation and loud pharisaical rant, in the late political battle. But, much as it has embarrassed and retarded our cause, terrifying and bewildering weak minds, the device has not availed in the past, and it shall avail still less in the future. The spirit of the Constitution we shall remember and obey; but the sword of justice, edged with common sense, must cut its way through everything else, to the very heart of the Rebellion.
Only from ourselves have we anything to fear. Self-distrust is more to be dreaded than foreign interference or Rebel despotism. The deportment of Great Britain has become more and more respectful towards us as we have shown ourselves worthy of respect; and even France has of late grown discreetly reticent on the subject of intervention. But it is said the Rebels will arm their slaves. Very well; if they think to save their boat by taking the bottom out, in order to make paddles of it, they are welcome to try the experiment. Are three or four hundred thousand negro soldiers going to accept from their masters the boon of freedom for themselves only, and not demand it for their race? Or think you their gratitude towards those masters is so extraordinary, that they will take arms against their brothers already in the field, and not be liable to commit the slight error of passing over and fighting by their side? In either case, Mr. Davis's proposition, if carried out, is practical abolitionism; and we have yet to learn how a tottering edifice can be rendered any more stable by the removal of its acknowledged "cornerstone." The plan is violently opposed by the slave-owning classes: for, whatever may be proclaimed to the contrary, they have risked this war, and devoted themselves to it, believing it to be a war for the aggrandizement of their peculiar institution; and if that succumbs, where is the gain? Already their new Government has become to them an object of dread and detestation, and they are beginning to look back with regretful hearts to the beneficent Union which they were in such rash haste to destroy. Only the leaders of the Rebellion can hope to gain anything by so perilous an expedient; for Slavery has become with them a secondary consideration,—no doubt Mr. Davis is sincere in asserting this,—and they are now ready to sacrifice it to their private ambition. They are in the position of men who, driven to extremity, will give up everything else in order to preserve their power, and their necks with it. But let us indulge in no useless apprehensions on this point. Such a proposition, seriously entertained by the Richmond Government, is of itself the strongest evidence we could have of the exhaustion of their resources. Every other means has failed, and this is their last resort. We are reminded of that vivid description, in one of Cooper's novels, of an Indian in his canoe drawn into the rapids of Niagara and swept over the falls,—who, in his wild efforts to save himself, continued paddling in the air even after he had passed the verge of the cataract. So the Confederate craft has reached the brink of destruction, and we may now look to see some frantic paddling in their air. Or shall we liken it to Milton's bad angel, flying to his new empire, but dropping into an unexpected "vast vacuity"?
"Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not by ill chance
This strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud
Instinct with fire and nitre hurried him
As many miles aloft."
That "ill chance" has been averted by the last election; and no such "tumultuous cloud" will gather again, to bear up the lost Anarch, if we courageously act our part. The danger now is from our own weakness, not from the enemy's strength.
A great and most important work still remains for us. It is not enough to perform simply the external and obvious duties of the hour. What we would insist on here is the internal and moral work to be done. Men have never yet given full credit to the power of an idea. With faith, ye shall remove mountains. A pebble of truth, in the hand of the shepherd-boy of Israel, is mightier to prevail than the spear like a weaver's beam. How long were the little band of Abolitionists despised! But they were the cutwater of the national ship. With their revolutionary idea, so opposed to the universal prejudice, they succeeded at last in moving the entire country, just as one cog-wheel set against another overcomes its resistance and puts the whole machinery in motion. The rills of thought, shooting from the heights of a few pure and lofty minds, have spread out into this sea of practical Abolitionism which now covers the whole land,—although the sea may be inclined to deny its source. May we, then, charge the pioneers of the Anti-Slavery sentiment with having caused this war? In the same manner we may regard the coming of Christ as being the cause of all the wars and persecutions of Christianity.
If such is the force of earnest conviction, consider what we too may do. We have gone to the polls and voted for the accomplishment of a certain object: far more intelligently than at the beginning of the war, (for few knew then what we were fighting for,) we have met the enemies of our country, and defeated them at the ballot-box. But there is another and no less important vote to be cast. The Twentieth Presidential Election is not the last, even for this year. We are to continue casting our ballots, every day, and day after day,—nay, year after year, if necessary,—to the end. We have had political suffrage; but moral suffrage is now called for. Here woman realizes her rights, so long talked about, and so little understood; here, too, even the intelligent, patriotic boy and girl can exert an influence. We know something of what words can do; but how little we appreciate the power which is behind words! By the wishes of your heart, by the aspirations of your soul, by the energies of your mind and will, you form about you an atmosphere as real as the air you breathe, although, like that, invisible. Not a prayer is lost; not a throb of patriotish goes for nothing; never a wave of impulse dies upon the ethereal deep in which we live and move and have our being. Be filled with the truth as with life itself; let the divine aura exhale from you wherever you move; and thus you may do more to overcome the opposition to our cause than when you deposited your ticket in the box. You may, perhaps, breathe the breath of life into the nostrils of the coldest clay of conservatism you know: for true it is that men not only catch manners, as they do diseases, one from another, but that they catch unconscious inspiration also. Boswell, when absent from London and his hero, acknowledged himself to be empty, vapid; and he became somewhat only when "impregnated with the Johnsonian ether." So the ether of your own earnest, fervent, patriotic character may impregnate the spiritless and help to sustain the brave. Consider, moreover, what an element may be thus generated by the combined hopes and prayers of a whole loyal people! This is the atmosphere which is to sustain the President and his advisers in their work: this, although we may not know it, and although they may be unaware, is the vital breath they need to give them wisdom and power equal to the great crisis; while even the soldiers, in the far-off fields of conflict, shall feel the agitations of this subtile fluid, this life-supporting oxygen, buoying up their hopes, and wafting their banners on to victory.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical. By John Stuart Mill. In Three Volumes. 12mo. Boston: W. V. Spencer.
At a time of deep national emotion, like the present, it is impossible that we Americans should not feel some bias of personal affection in reading the works of those great living Englishmen who have been true to us in the darkest hour. Were it only for his faithful friendship to freedom and to us, Mr. Mill has a right to claim an attentive audience for every word he has ever written; and this collection of his miscellaneous writings, covering a period of thirty years, has a special interest as showing the successive steps by which he has risen to this high attitude of nobleness.
But apart from these special ties, Mr. Mill claims attention as the most advanced of English minds, and the ablest, all things considered, of contemporary English writers. His detached works have long since found a very large American audience,—larger, perhaps, than even their home-circle of readers; and the sort of biographical interest which attaches to a collection of shorter essays—giving, as it does, a glimpse at the training of the writer—will more than compensate for the want of continuity in these volumes, and for the merely local interest which belongs to many of the subjects treated. Church-rates and the English currency have not to us even the interest of heraldry, for that at least can offer pictures of mermaids, and great ingenuity in Latin puns; but, on the other hand, every discussion of the British university-system has a positive value, in the exceedingly crude and undeveloped condition of American collegiate methods. There is the same disparity of interest in the different critical essays. Bentham has hardly exerted an appreciable influence on American thought, and the transitory authority of Coleridge is now merged in more potent agencies; yet when the essays bearing those great names were first printed in the periodical then edited by Mill, they made an era in contemporary English literature, and therefore indirectly modified our own.
Thus, in one way or another, almost all these essays have a value. The style is always clear, always strong, sometimes pointed, seldom brilliant, never graceful; it is the best current sample, indeed, of that good, manly, rather colorless English which belongs naturally to Parliamentary Speeches and Quarterly Reviews. Not being an American, the author may use novel words without the fear of being called provincial; so that understandable, evidentiary, desiderate, leisured, and inamoveability stalk at large within his pages. As a controversialist, he is a trifle sharp, but never actually discourteous; and it is pleasant to see that his chivalry makes him gentlest in dealing with the humblest, while his lance rings against the formidable shield of a Cambridge Professor or a Master of Trinity as did that of the disguised Ivanhoe upon the shield of Bois-Guilbert.
The historical essays in this collection are exceedingly admirable, especially the defence of Pericles and the Athenians, in the second paper on Crete's History. In reading the articles upon ethical and philosophical questions, one finds more drawbacks. The profoundest truths can hardly be reached, perhaps, by one who, at the end of his life, as at the beginning, is a sensationalist in metaphysics and a utilitarian in ethics. It is only when dealing with these themes that he seems to show any want of thoroughness: unfairness he never shows. In the closing tract on "Utilitarianism," which the American publishers have added to the English collection, one feels especially this drawback. As the theory of universal selfishness falls so soon as one considers that a man is capable of resigning everything that looks like happiness, and of plunging into apparent misery, because he thinks it right,—so the theory of utilitarianism falls, when one considers that a man is capable of abstaining from an action that would apparently be useful to all around him, from a secret conviction that it is wrong in itself. There are many things which are intrinsically wrong, although, so far as one can see, they would do good to all around. To assassinate a bad neighbor,—to rob a miser and distribute his goods,—to marry Rochester, while his insane wife is living, (for Jane Eyre,)—to put to death an imbecile and uncomfortable grandmother, (for a Feegeean,)—these are actions which are indefensible, though the balance of public advantages might seem greatly in their favor. It is probable that at this moment a great good would be done to this nation and to the world by the death of Jefferson Davis; yet the bare suggestion of his assassination, in the case of Colonel Dahlgren, was received with a universal shudder, and disavowed as an atrocious slander. But Mr. Mill can meet such ethical problems only by reverting to that general principle of Kant, which he elsewhere repudiates: "So act that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law for all rational beings." Mr. Mill says of such instances, "The action is of a class which, if practised generally, would be generally injurious, and this is the ground of the obligation to abstain from it." But under the rule of utilitarianism, it is the injuriousness itself which should be the principle of classification, and to prove an action innoxious is at once to separate it from that class; so that the objection falls. By his own principles, a murder which would benefit the community is by that very attribute differenced from ordinary and injurious murders, nor can any good argument be found against its commission. The possible bad precedent is at best a possible misapprehension, to be sufficiently averted by concealment, where concealment is practicable.
In dealing with contemporary and practical questions, Mr. Mill shows always pre-eminent ability, with less of the Insular traits than any living Englishman. While there is perhaps no single passage in these volumes so thoroughly grand as his argument for religions freedom in his essay on Liberty,—an argument which the most heretical theologians of either Continent could hardly have put so boldly or so well,—yet through the whole series of essays there runs the same fine strain. He repeatedly renews his clear and irresistible appeal for the equal political rights of the sexes: a point on which there is coming to be but one opinion among the most advanced minds of Europe and America,—a unanimity which, after the more immediate problem of Slavery is disposed of, must erelong bring about some practical application of the principle, in our republican commonwealths. It is interesting to notice in this connection, that Mr. Mill has included with his own essays the celebrated article by his wife, on "The Enfranchisement of Women," and has prefixed to it one of the noblest eulogies ever devoted to any wife by any husband.
He deals with strictly American subjects in the best criticism ever written upon De Tocqueville, where he shows conclusively the error of that great writer, in attributing to democracy, as such, many social phenomena which are equally observable under the English monarchy. These volumes also include—what the English edition of 1859 of course did not contain—the later essays on "The Contest in America," "The Slave Power," and "Non-Intervention." In treating of Slavery and of the War, the author rarely commits an error; in dealing with other American questions, he is sometimes misled by defective information, and cites gravely, with the prelude, "It is admitted," or "It is understood," statements which have their sole origin in the haste of travellers or in the croaking of disappointed egotists. The government of the majority does not end in tyranny: cultivated Americans are not cowards: the best heads are not excluded from public life: free schools do not tend to stifle free thought, but infinitely to multiply it: individuality of character is not checked, but healthily trained, by political equality. Six months in this country would do more to disabuse Mr. Mill, in these matters, than years of mere reading; and it is a positive injury to his large ideas that he should not take the opportunity of testing them on the only soil where they are being put in practice. Whenever he shall come, his welcome is secure. In the mean time, all that we Americans can do to testify to his deserts is to reprint his writings beautifully, as these are printed,—and to read them universally, as these will be read.
Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities. Being the Report of a Commission of Inquiry, appointed by the United States Sanitary Commission. With an Appendix, containing the Testimony. Printed by the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Philadelphia.
That uniform thoroughness and accuracy which have marked all that has been done by the Sanitary Commission, not in the field alone, but in the committee-room and the printing-office, were never better shown than in this Report. It attempts something which, unless done thoroughly, was not worth doing; since, on a subject which appeals so strongly to the feelings, mere generalities and gossip do more harm than good. It is the work of a special Commission of Inquiry, composed of three physicians, (Drs. Mott, Delafield, and Wallace,) two lawyers, (Messrs. Wilkins and Hare,)and one clergyman (Mr. Walden). This commission has performed a great amount of labor, and has digested its result into a form so systematic as to be logically irresistible. The facts on which the statement rests are a large body of evidence, taken under oath, from prisoners of both armies, and confirmed by the admissions, carefully collated, of the Rebel press. The conclusion is, that, in the Southern prisons, "tens of thousands of helpless men have been, and are now being, disabled and destroyed by a process as certain as poison, and as cruel as the torture or burning at the stake, because nearly as agonizing and more prolonged."
The next step is to fix the responsibility for all these horrors. All theories of apology—as that the sufferings were accidental or exceptional, or that, badly as our soldiers may have fared, the Rebel soldiers fared little better—are taken up and conclusively refuted, the last-named with especial thoroughness. The inevitable inference drawn by the Commission is, that these inhumanities were "designedly inflicted on the part of the Rebel Government," and were not "due to causes which such authorities could not control."
The immediate preparation of this able report is understood to be due to the Rev. Treadwell Walden, an Episcopal clergyman of Philadelphia, not unknown to the readers of the "Atlantic." His present work will be the permanent authority for the facts which it records, and will justify to future generations the suggestion with which it ends, that these cruelties are the legitimate working of a form of government which takes human slavery for its basis. The record of such a government is fitly written in these pages: it is as appropriate as is, for a king of Dahomey, his funeral pyramid of skulls.
Freedom of Mind in Willing; or, Every Being that Wills a Creative First Cause. By Rowland G. Hazard. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. 455.
The State of Rhode Island is the most metaphysically inclined of all the sisterhood, not excepting South Carolina. A superficial observer or a passing traveller might take just the opposite view of her tendencies. The stranger who should complete a cycle of sumptuous suppers in Providence, or spend but a day or two in Newport at the height of the season, might conclude that Matter with its most substantial appliances, or Fashion with her most fascinating excitements, had combined to exclude all thoughts of the spiritual from the few square miles over which this least of the States holds dominion. Should he leave the two capitals of luxurious wealth and giddy fashion and seek for the haunts of Philosophy among the quiet nooks which her few valleys and her splendid sea-coast afford, he might judge that meditation had been effectually frightened from them all, for nowhere can he escape the whir of countless spindles and the clash of thousands of looms.
But inferences like these may not be trusted, as history demonstrates. The most admirable of modern treatises in the subtile science, that masterpiece of speculation in matter and style, "The Minute Philosopher" of Bishop Berkeley, was composed in Rhode Island, and the place is still indicated where the musing metaphysician is said to have written the greater portion of the work. That Berkeley's genius did not abandon the region, when he left it, is manifest from the direction taken by the late Judge Durfee, whose "Pan-Idea," if it cannot be accepted as in all respects a satisfactory theory of the relations of the spiritual universe, may be safely taken as an indication of the lofty and daring Platonism of the ingenious author. The anonymous author of "Language by a Heteroscian" is another thinker of somewhat similar tastes. If common report do not greatly err, it is the same thinker who in the volume before us solicits the attention of the philosophic world to his views of the Will. It adds greatly to the interest of the volume itself, in our view, and we trust will do so in the view of our readers, to know that he is no studious recluse nor professional philosopher, but active, shrewd, and keen-sighted, both in his mills, when at home in a fitly named valley, and upon Change, when in Boston or New York.
Surely Roger Williams, that boldest of idealists, did not live in vain, in that he not only set apart the State which he founded as a place of refuge for all persons given to free and daring speculation, but made it a kind of Prospero's Isle, that should never cease to be haunted by some metaphysical spell.
The appearance of such a work from such a source is of itself most refreshing, as an indication that a life of earnest devotion to material pursuits is not inconsistent with an ardent appreciation of the surpassing importance of speculative inquiries. One such example as this is enough to refute the oft-repeated assertion that in America all philosophy must of course give way before the absorbing interest in the pursuit of wealth. A few years since we chanced to send a copy of an American edition of Plato's "Phaedo" to a German Professor. "Eine wirkliche Erscheinung," was his reply in acknowledgment, "to see an edition of a work of Plato from America." What would be his amazement at receiving a copy of a disquisition on the Will written by an American mill-owner!
It is still more refreshing to find the author so sincere and so earnest an advocate of the elevating tendency of philosophical studies. There is a charming simplicity in the words with which his Preface is concluded:—"Whatever opinion may be formed of the success or failure of any effort to elucidate this subject, I trust it will be admitted that the arguments I have presented at least tend to show that the investigation may open more elevated and more elevating views of our position and our powers, and may reveal new modes of influencing our own intellectual and moral character, and thus have a more immediate, direct, and practical bearing on the progress of our race in virtue and happiness than any inquiry in physical science." Such testimony, coupled with the impression made by his argument, is most gratifying, not only in consideration of the source from which it comes, but also as contrasted with the course of so much of the speculative philosophy of the day, towards Materialism in Psychology, Necessarianism in Morals, Naturalism in Philosophy, and Pantheism in Theology.
The doctrine of the writer, or rather his position with respect to theories of the Will, is distinctly indicated by the title of his volume. It is obvious that he must be a decided asserter of Liberty as opposed to Necessity who dares to throw down the gauntlet in support of the thesis that "every being who wills is a creative first cause." All his views of the soul and of its doings are entirely consistent with the direction which is required by this audacious assertion. That the soul is an originator in most of its activities is his perpetually asserted theme. To maintain this he is ready almost to question the reality, as he more than questions the necessity, of the existence of matter, verging occasionally, on this point, upon Berkeley's views and style of thinking. The constructive capacities of the intellect are inferred from the variety of mathematical creations which it originates, as well as from the more diverse and interesting structures which the never wearied and ever aspiring fantasy is always building. Should any one question the right of these creations to be, or seek to detract from their importance, our author is ready to defend them to the utmost in contrast with matter and its claims. Indeed, the author's exposition of his doctrine of the Will is by itself an inconsiderable source of interest, when separated from the views of all the functions of the spirit, which are interwoven with it. In discussing the Will he is necessarily led to treat of its relations to the other powers and functions of the spirit, and hence by necessity to give his philosophy of the Soul. This philosophy, briefly described, is one which regards the soul in its nature and its acts, in its innermost structure and its outmost energies, as capable of and destined to action. This in also its dignity and its glory. The soul or spirit, so far from being the subject of material forces, or the outgrowth of successive series of material agencies, or the subtile product or potence of material laws, is herself the conscious mistress and sovereign of them all, giving to matter and development and law all their importance, as she condescends to use these either as the mirror in which her own creations are reflected or the vehicle by which her acts can be expressed.
How the author maintains and defends this position the limits of this brief notice will not allow us to specify. The views expressed which have the closest pertinency to the will are those which lay especial stress upon the soul as capable of wants, and as thus impelled to action. Emotion and sensibility neither of them qualifies for action. Want must supervene, to point to the unattained future, to excite to change; and to this want knowledge also must be added, in order to direct the activity. Under the stimulus thus furnished, the future must be created, as it were, by the will of the soul itself, before it is made real in fact.
We are not quite sure that we understand the author's doctrine of Want, and its relations to the activities of the will, nor that, so far as we do understand it, we should accept it. But we agree with him entirely, that it is precisely by means of and in connection with a correct analysis of these impelling forces that the real nature and import of the will can be satisfactorily evolved. Mr. Hazard seems to us to make too little difference between the power of the soul to act and its power to will or choose. He conceives the will as the capacity which qualifies for effort of every kind, as the conative power in general, instead of emphasizing it as the capacity for a special kind of effort, namely, that of moral selection.
The second part of the volume is devoted to a criticism of Edwards, the author on whose "steel cap," as on that of Hobbes of old, every advocate of liberty is impelled to try the strength and temper of his weapons. For a critical antagonist, Edwards is admirable, his use of language being far from precise and consistent, and his definitions and statements, through his extreme wariness, being vague and vacillating enough to allow abundant material for comment. Of these advantages Mr. Hazard knows how to avail himself, and shows not a little acuteness in exposing the untenable positions and the inconsequent reasoning of the New-England dialectician. The most ingenious of the chapters upon Edwards is that in which he refutes the conclusions drawn from the foreknowledge of God. His position is the following:—If we concede that the foreknowledge of God were inconsistent with liberty, and involved the necessity of human volitions, we may suppose the Supreme Being to forego the exercise of foreknowledge in respect to such events. But it would not therefore follow that God would be thereby taken by surprise by any such volitions, or would be incompetent to regulate His own actions or to control the issues of them in governing the universe. This he seeks to show, very ingeniously, by asserting that the Supreme Being must be competent to foresee not the actual volition that will be made, but every variety that is possible; and as a consummate chess-player provides by comprehensive forecast against every possible move which his antagonist can make, and has ready a counter-move, so may we, on the supposition suggested, conceive the Supreme Being as fully competent, without the foreknowledge of the actual, by means of His foreknowledge of the possible, to control and govern the course of the future. This solution is certainly ingenious, and doubtless original with the author. It has in all probability occurred to other minds; but, inasmuch as the advocate for freedom does not usually allow that he is shut up to the alternative of either denying the divine purpose or abandoning human freedom, the suggestion of the author has not often, if ever, been seriously urged before. But we have no space for critical comments.
The style of the author is good. With some diffuseness, he is usually clear and animated. The circumstances that he has approached the subject in his own way, independently of the method of books and the technics of the schools, has lent great freshness to his thoughts and illustrations. The occasional observations which he throws in are always ingenious and sometimes profound. He shows himself at every turn to be an acute observer, a comprehensive thinker, and deeply imbued with the meditative spirit. The defects incidental to his peculiar training are more than compensated by the freshness of his manner and the directness of his language. More interesting still is the imaginative tendency which gives to many of his passages the charm of poetic feeling, and elevates them to the truly Platonic rhythm. There are single sentences, and now and then entire paragraphs, which are gems in their way, that sparkle none the less for the plain setting of common sense and unpretending diction by which they are relieved.
We ought to add that the attitude of the author in respect to moral and religious truth is truly, but not obtrusively, reverent. Though he asserts for man the dignity that pertains to a creator, yet he never forgets the limits under which and the materials out of which his creations are wrought. His Theism is outspoken and sincere.
Whatever judgment may be passed upon this volume in the schools of philosophy or theology, all truth-loving men will agree that it brings honor to the literature and thought of the country. No man can read a few of the many passages of refined thought and sagacious observation with which the volume abounds, without acknowledging the presence of philosophic genius. No one can read the passages with which each principal division of the work concludes, without admiring the fine strains which indicate the presence of genius inspired by poetic feeling and elevated by adoring reverence. We are sure that the fit, though scanty, audience from whom the author craves a kindly judgment will cheerfully render to him far more than this, even their unfeigned admiration.
Military Bridges: With Suggestions of New Expedients and Constructions for crossing Streams and Chasms; including, also, Designs for Trestle and Truss Bridges for Military Railroads. Adapted especially to the Wants of the Service in the United States. By Hermann Haupt, late Chief of Bureau in Charge of the Construction and Operation of United States Military Railways, etc. New York: D. Van Nostrand. 8vo. pp. 310.
There is in the War Department at Washington a series of splendid photographs, illustrative of scenes along the line of march of our armies in Virginia, and depicting minutely the great pioneer labor of transporting troops and ammunition, giving evidence of the greatest engineering genius, and the illimitable resource that has been evoked by this dreadful War of Rebellion.
The book before us is the result of these operations reduced to form. The author's name has for the last twenty-five years been associated with most of the great works of internal improvement in this country, and is familiar to every Massachusetts man as connected with the great railroad-enterprise of the State,—the Hoosac Tunnel.
The professional reputation of the author of "The General Theory of Bridge-Construction" would of itself be a sufficient guaranty that a new work from the same source would be entitled to consideration. General Haupt does not often appear before the public as an author: his works are few, but of rare merit. The first which appeared, "The General Theory of Bridge-Construction," was the fruit of many years of experiment, observation, and calculation, and at once established his reputation in Europe and America, as unequalled in the specialty of Bridges. This work was not only the first, but up to the present time is the only publication in which the action of the parts in a complicated system is explained, and the direction and intensity of each and every strain brought within the reach of mathematical formulas, and rendered accurately determinable. Before the appearance of this book it is probable that not another engineer in the world could be found able to calculate the strain upon every sort of bridge-truss, but only on certain simple forms and combinations. Now, such calculations can be made by any student in any institution where civil engineering is taught thoroughly, and where "Haupt on Bridges" is used as a text-book. Professor Gillespie, writing from Europe, remarked that the greatest engineer of the age, Robert Stephenson, and his distinguished associates, had spoken of this book in terms of the highest commendation.
After the publication of the controversial papers between Messrs. Stephenson and Fairbairn in regard to the Britannia Bridge, it became apparent that neither of these gentlemen, with all their calculations and expenditures in experiments, had determined the proper distribution of the strains, and the size and strength required for the side-plates of tubular bridges, but only for those at the top and bottom. General Haupt solved the problem mathematically, and sent a communication on the subject to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which has been extensively copied into the scientific journals of Europe, and has added largely to the reputation of its author. In the Victoria Bridge at Montreal, the distribution of material in the vertical plates conforms to the proportions given by General Haupt.
About the year 1853, General Haupt, then Chief Engineer of the Pennsylvania Railroad, reviewed the work of Charles Ellett on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, with other plans of improvement that had been suggested, and, in a pamphlet of about a hundred pages, proposed a novel, bold, and simple method for the improvement of these rivers, costing scarcely a tenth as much as the estimated expense of some of the other methods, and promising greater durability and efficacy. The Pittsburg Board of Trade recently appointed a scientific commission to investigate the whole subject; and their report, which is thorough and exhaustive, gives unanimously the preference to the plan of General Haupt, as the only practicable mode of improving the Ohio River, so as to insure a permanent depth of water of not less than six feet. In passing, we would remark that one of the greatest difficulties the War Department has had to contend with has been the lack of suitable navigation on the Ohio River, and it is to be regretted that Government did not at once seize upon the plans of General Haupt and carry them into execution.
In the spring of 1862, General Haupt was solicited to take charge of the reconstruction of the railroad from Acquia Creek to Fredericksburg. Without material other than that furnished by forests two miles distant, and without skilled mechanics, but simply by the aid of common soldiers who had no previous instruction, he erected, in nine days, a structure eighty feet high and four hundred feet long, which for more than a year carried the immense railroad-trains supplying the Army of the Potomac. It was visited and critically examined by officers in the foreign service, as a remarkable specimen of bold and successful military engineering.
Major-General McDowell, in his defence before the Court of Inquiry, made the following statement in regard to the Potomac-Creek Bridge, on the line of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad.
"The large railroad-bridge over the Rappahannock, some six hundred feet long by sixty-five feet high, and the larger part of the one over Potomac Creek, some four hundred feet long by eighty feet high, were built from the trees cut down by the troops in the vicinity, and this without those troops losing their discipline or their instruction as soldiers. The work they did excited, to a high degree, the wonder and admiration of several distinguished foreign officers, who had never imagined such constructions possible by such means, and in such a way, in the time in which they were done.
"The Potomac-Run Bridge is a most remarkable structure. When it is considered, that, in the campaigns of Napoleon, trestle-bridges of more than one story, even of moderate height, were regarded as impracticable, and that, too, for common military roads, it is not difficult to understand why distinguished Europeans should express surprise at so bold a specimen of American military engineering. It is a structure which ignores all the rules and precedents of military science as laid down in books. It is constructed chiefly of round sticks cut from the woods, and not even divested of bark; the legs of the trestles are braced with round poles. It is in four stories, three of trestles and one of crib-work. The total height from the deepest part of the stream to the rail is nearly eighty feet. It carries daily from ten to twenty heavy railway-trains in both directions, and has withstood several severe freshets and storms without injury.
"This bridge was built in May, 1862, in nine working-days, during which time the greater part of the material was cut and hauled. It contains more than two million feet of lumber. The original structure, which it replaced, required as many months as this did days. It was constructed by the common soldiers of the Army of the Rappahannock, (command of Major-General McDowell,) under the supervision of his aide-de-camp, Colonel, now Brigadier-General, Hermann Haupt, Chief of Railroad Construction and Transportation."
A fine lithographic drawing of this bridge, taken from a photograph, forms the frontispiece to the volume before us.
Previous to the Battle of Chancellorsville, General Haupt received instructions to prepare for a rapid advance of the Army of the Potomac towards Richmond. He provided a sufficient amount of material to rebuild all the bridges between Fredericksburg and Richmond, and adopted the bold and novel expedient of portable railroad-bridge trusses. These trusses were built in advance, in spans of sixty feet; they were to be carried whole on cars to the end of the track, then dragged like logs, with the aid of timber-wheels and oxen, to the sites of the bridges, where they were to be raised bodily on wooden piers, and the rails laid over them. The reverse at Chancellorsville prevented this plan from being carried into effect; but four of these spans were used to replace the trestle-bridge across the Acquia Creek, where they were tested in actual use, and answered perfectly.
When informed of the contemplated advance on Richmond, General Haupt concluded to replace the trestle-bridge across Potomac Creek by the military truss-bridge, which was of a more permanent character. The trestle-bridge had performed good service for more than a year, but, as it obstructed the water-way of the stream too much, and as the preservation of the communications would become of even greater importance after the advance than it had previously been, it was thought best to take it down. General Hooker, having heard of this determination, sent for General Haupt in much alarm, and inquired if the report as to the proposed rebuilding of the bridge was true, and protested against having it disturbed, saying that he needed all the supplies that could be run forward, and could not allow a suspension of transportation even for a day. General Haupt replied, that he was willing to be held responsible for results, but must be permitted to control his own means; he did not ask for a suspension of transportation; he would take down the high bridge and build a permanent bridge on the piers, and would not detain a single train even for an hour. General Hooker and staff declared that they did not believe such a feat possible; yet it was actually accomplished without any detention to the trains whatever, and in a period of time so brief as to be almost incredible. In less than two days the trusses of the three spans were placed in position.
If there is any one faculty which General Haupt appears to possess in a preëminent degree, it is resource. He never finds an engineering problem so difficult that some satisfactory mode of solution does not present itself to his mind. He seems to comprehend intuitively the difficulties of a position, and the means of surmounting them. He never waits; if he cannot readily obtain the material he desires, he takes that at hand. His new work on "Military Bridges" exhibits this power of resource in a remarkable degree; it is full of expedients, novel, practical, and useful, among which may be mentioned expedients for crossing streams in front of the enemy by means of blanket-boats,—ingenious substitutes for pontoon-bridges, floats, and floating-bridges,—plans for the complete destruction of railroad bridges and track, and for reconstructing track,—modes of defence for lines of road, etc.: for the book, be it observed, is not limited in its contents to the single subject indicated by its title.
The design of the author, as stated in the Introduction, appears to have been to give to the army a practically useful book. He has not failed to draw from other sources where suitable material was furnished, an indebtedness which he has gracefully acknowledged; but a great part of the book contains new and original plans and expedients, the fruits of the experience and observation of the author while in charge of the construction and transportation for the armies of the Rappahannock, of Virginia, and of the Potomac, under Generals McDowell, Pope, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade. It is a book no officer can afford to be without; and to the general reader who wishes to be thoroughly versed in the operations of the war, it will commend itself as replete with information on this subject.
Meditations on the Essence of Christianity, and on the Religious Questions of the Day. By M. Guizot. Translated from the French under the Superintendence of the Author. London: John Murray.
Whoever is familiar with religious controversies, past and present, has not failed to notice of late an improvement in their tone, for which we cannot be too deeply thankful. This does not arise solely from the neglect which now prevails of the ancient and highly recommended plan of imprisoning, torturing, and roasting such obstinate heretics as are too obtuse or too sharp-sighted to yield to milder methods of treatment. Such incidents in history as the exposure of Christians to hungry beasts in the Colosseum, a Smithfield burnt-offering of persistent saints, or a Spanish auto-da-fe, with attending civic, ecclesiastical, and sometimes even royal functionaries, and wide-encircling half-rejoicing and half-compassionate multitudes, were not without their charms and compensations for victims blessed with a fervid fancy or a deathless purpose. These cruel scenes associated such with the illustrious dead who have held life cheaper than truth, and gave them an opportunity of saying to countless multitudes such as no pulpit-orator could attract and sway,—"See how Christians die!" The liability to such trials turned away the fickle from the assembly of the faithful and attracted the magnanimous. When grim Puritans, in our early history, broke the stubborn necks of peace-preaching Quakers, the latter often thought it a special favor from Providence that they were permitted to bear so striking a testimony against religious fanaticism. They felt, like John Brown in his Virginian prison, that the best service they could render to the cause they had loved so well was to love it even unto death. Indeed, martyrs in mounting the scaffold have ever felt the sentiment,—
"Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."
Such heroic treatment always relieves any cause from contemptuous neglect, the one thing which is always harder to bear than the fires of martyrdom. Every reader of Bunyan knows that he complains far less of his twelve years' imprisonment than he exults over the success of his prison born, world-ranging Pilgrim. He would doubtless have preferred lying in that "den," Bedford jail, other twelve years to being unable to say,—
"My Pilgrim's book has travelled sea and land,
Yet could I never come to understand
That it was slighted or turned out of door
By any kingdom, were they rich or poor."
The dreariest period in religious discussion commonly occurs when men have just ceased to inflict legal penalties upon the heterodox, but have not yet learned those amenities which lend so sweet and gentle a dignity to debate. In looking over the dusty pamphlets which entomb so many clerical controversies of our Colonial times, it has often seemed as though we had lighted on some bar-room wrangle, translated out of its original billingsgate into scholarly classical quotations and wofully wrested tests of Holy Writ. This illusion seems all the more probable when we remember that the potations which inspired the loose jester and the ministerial pamphleteer of that period but too often flowed from the same generous tap. This phase of theological dispute is best typified in that eminent English divine who wrote,—"I say, without the least heat whatever, that Mr. Wesley lies." The manner in which such reverend disputants sought to force their conclusions on the reluctant has not infrequently reminded us of sturdy old Grimshawe, the predecessor of Bronté at Haworth, of whom Mrs. Gaskell reports, that, finding so many of his parishioners inclined to loiter away their Sundays at the ale-house as greatly to thin the attendance upon his ministry, he was wont to rush in upon them armed with a heavy whip, and scourge them with many a painful stroke to church, where, doubtless, he scourged them again with still more painful sermons.
But, bad as were the controversial habits of the clergy, those of their skeptical opponents were still worse. That was surely a strange state of things where such freethinking as the "Age of Reason" could win a wide circulation and considerable credit. But it was not merely the vulgar among freethinkers who then substituted sophistry and declamation for honesty and sense. The philosophers of the Institute caught the manners of the rabble. What a revolting scene does M. Martin sketch in his "Essay on the Life and Works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre"! "The Institute had proposed this as a prize-question:—'What institutions are best adapted to establish the morals of a nation?' Bernardin was to offer the report. The competitors had treated the theme in the spirit of their judges. Terrified at the perversity of their opinions, the author of "Studies of Nature" wished to oppose to them more wholesome and consoling ideas, and he closed his report with one of those morsels of inspiration into which his soul poured the gentle light of the Gospel. On the appointed day, in the assembled Institute, Bernardin read his report. The analysis of the memoirs was heard at first with calmness; but, at the first words of the exposition of the principles of a theistical philosopher, a furious outcry arose from every part of the hall. Some mocked him, asking where he had seen God, and what form He bore. Others styled him weak, credulous, superstitious; they threatened to expel him from the assembly of which he had proved himself unworthy; they even pushed madness so far as to challenge him to single combat, in order to prove, sword in hand, that there is no God. Cabanis, celebrated by Carlyle for his dogma, 'Thought is secreted, like bile, somewhere in the region of the small intestines,' cried out, 'I swear that there is no God, and I demand that His name shall never be spoken in this place.' The reporter left the members in grave dispute, not whether there is a God, but whether the mention of His name should be permitted."
We have fallen upon better days. The high debate which is now engaging the attention of Christendom is conducted, for the most part, on both sides, with distinguished courtesy. Not that the question at issue is, or is felt to be, any less vital than former ones. The aim of modern free-inquiry is to remove religious life from the dogmatic basis, upon which, in Christian lands, it has hitherto stood. Denying the existence, and sometimes the possibility, of a supernatural revelation, now admitting, now doubting, and now rejecting the personal immortality of the soul, our freethinkers profess a high regard for the religious culture of the race. They would found a new scientific faith, and make spiritual life an outgrowth of the soul's devout sensibilities. The soul is to draw its nutriment from Nature, science, and all inspired books; so that, if preaching is as fashionable in the new dispensation as under the old, the future saints will be in as bad a plight as, according to eminent theological authority, were those of a late celebrated divine:—
"His hearers can't tell you on Sunday beforehand,
If in that day's discourse they'll be Bibled or Koraned."
But is such a religion possible? M. Guizot thinks not, and comes forward in full philosophical dignity to repel recent assaults upon supernatural religion. The chief gravity of these attacks has doubtless consisted in exegetical and historic criticism. M. Guizot deems these matters of minor consequence, and believes that the most important thing is to settle certain fundamental metaphysical questions, and correct prevalent erroneous ideas respecting the purpose of revelation. His book consists of eight Meditations: Upon Natural Problems,—Christian Dogmas,—The Supernatural,—The Limits of Science,—Revelation,—Inspiration of the Scriptures,—God according to the Bible,—Jesus according to the Gospel. These themes are presented so skilfully as to attract the interest of the careless, while challenging the fixed attention of the trained thinker. The reader will find himself lured on, by the freshness of the author's method of handling, into the very heart of these profound and difficult questions. He will be charmed to find them treated with calm penetration and outspoken frankness. No late writer has displayed a better comprehension of all phases of and parties to the controversy. There is a singular absence of controversial tone, a marvellous lucidity of statement, and a visible honesty of intention, as refreshing as they are rare,—while a spirit of warm and tender devotion steals in through the argumentation, like the odor of unseen flowers through a giant and tangled wood. Yet there is no want of fidelity to personal convictions, no effort by cunning shifts to bring about an apparent reconciliation of opponents which the writer knows will not endure. With a firm hand he touches the errors of contending schools of interpreters, and demands their abandonment. To Rationalist and Hyper-Inspirationist in their strife he says, like another Moses, "Why smitest thou thy fellow?"
Those who have watched carefully the tendencies of these parties for many years must sometimes have grown despondent. The progressive school has claimed with unscientific haste the adoption, as a fundamental principle of Biblical interpretation, of the negation of the supernatural. Their argument is simply, that human experience disproves the supernatural. Man, a recent comer upon the globe, who has never kept a very accurate record of his experience, who comes forth from mystery for a few days of troubled life, and then vanishes in darkness,—he in his short stay upon earth has watched the play of its laws, which were before him and will remain after him, and has learned without any revelation that God never has changed, never will, never can change or suspend them! Who shall assure us that our experience of these laws does not differ from that of Peter and John, the Apostles? How much better to say of them with Hume, Whatever the fact, we cannot believe it, or to query with Montaigne, Que sais-je? Far better might we say that human experience can never overthrow faith in the supernatural, for none can ever say what has been the experience of the countless dead over whom oblivion broods. Shall a few savans say, Our experience outweighs the experience of the Hebrews plus one hundred generations of dead Gentiles plus one universal instinct of humanity? Credat M. Littré, non ὁι πολλοι, M. Guizot, vel Agassiz. But the laws of Nature are uncha——Ah! that is the very point in dispute. Why can they not alter? Because they are invari——Tut! Well, then, b-e-c-a-u-s-e——When you find a good argument, put it into that blank. Till then, adieu.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Those who claim a plenary verbal inspiration as essential to a real revelation are, according to M. Guizot, equally remote from a truly scientific spirit. Errors in rhetoric and grammar, passages where the writers speak of astronomical and geological matters in consonance with the prevailing, but, in many cases, mistaken theories of their times, being pointed out in the Bible, these cry out, "There can be no real errors in an inspired book,"—and we are at once amazed and disgusted to hear men deny the reality of things which they can but perceive, quite as sturdily as the Port-Royalists refused to allow the presence of sundry propositions in their books, which, notwithstanding the Pope's infallible assertion, they had no recollection of thinking or writing, which they supposed they had always hated and disavowed, and which they could by no ingenuity of search discover. Sir Thomas Browne might enjoy, could he revisit the world, the privilege of seeing many who are reduced to defend their faith with Tertullian's desperate resolution,—"It is certain, because it is impossible." If ever we escape from such ineptitude, it will come about by the diffusion of a more philosophic temper, and the use of a logic that shall refuse to exclude the facts of human nature from fair treatment, that shall embrace and account for all the questions involved, and that shall decline to receive as truth errors of finite science because found in an inspired book. We welcome this volume as an example of the right spirit and tendency in these grave discussions, and shall look eagerly for the promised three succeeding ones.
This translation, though "executed under the superintendence of the author," evidently does no justice to the original. We have not seen the book in French, but we venture to say that M. Guizot never wrote French which could answer to this version, awkward, careless, and sometimes obscure. A certain picture of dull and ancient aspect, which had long passed for an original from the hand of Leonardo da Vinci, and, despite the raptures of sentimental people who sought to tickle their own vanity by pretending to perceive in it the marks of its high origin, had commonly awakened only a sigh of regret over the transitoriness of pictorial glory, fell at length into the hands of a skilful artist. By careful examination, this worthy person became satisfied that the painting was indeed all that had been claimed, but that its primal splendors had been obscured by the defacing brush of some incompetent restorer. With loving care he removed the dimming colors, and to an admiring world was revealed anew the Christ of the Supper. Will not some American publisher perform a like kindly function for Guizot?
History of the Anti-Slavery Measures of the Thirty-Seventh and Thirty-Eighth United States Congress, 1861-64. By Henry Wilson. Boston: Walker, Wise, & Co. 12mo. pp. 384.
Senator Wilson is admirably qualified to record the anti-slavery legislation in which he has borne so prominent and honorable a part. Few but those engaged in debates can thoroughly understand their salient points, and fix upon the precise sentences in which the position, arguments, and animating spirit of opposite parties are stated and condensed. The present volume is a labor-saving machine of great power to all who desire or need a clear view of the course of Congressional legislation on measures of emancipation, but who prefer to rest in ignorance rather than wade through the debates as reported in the "Congressional Globe," striving to catch, amid the waste of words, the leading ideas or passions on which questions turn.
The first thing which strikes the reader in Mr. Wilson's well-executed epitome is the gradual character of this anti-slavery legislation, and the general subordination of philanthropic to military considerations in its conduct. The questions were not taken up in the order of their abstract importance, but as they pressed on the practical judgment for settlement in exigencies of the Government. When Slavery became an obstruction to the progress of the national arms, opposition to it was the dictate of prudence as well as of conscience, and its defenders at once placed themselves in the position of being more interested in the preservation of slavery than in the preservation of the nation. The Republicans, charged heretofore with sacrificing the expedient to the right, could now retort that their opponents were sacrificing the expedient to the wrong.
Senator Wilson's volume gives the history of twenty-three anti-slavery measures, in the order of their inception and discussion. Among these are the emancipation of slaves used for insurrectionary purposes,—the forbidding of persons in the army to return fugitive slaves,—the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia,—the President's proposition to aid States in the abolition of slavery,—the prohibition of slavery in the Territories,—the confiscation and emancipation bill of Senator Clark,—the appointment of diplomatic representatives to Hayti and Liberia,—the bill for the suppression of the African slave-trade,—the enrolment and pay of colored soldiers,—the anti-slavery Amendment to the Constitution,—the bill to aid the States to emancipate their slaves,—and the reconstruction of Rebel States. The account of the introduction of these and other measures, and the debates on them, are given by Mr. Wilson with brevity, fairness, and skill. A great deal of the animation of the discussion, and of the clash and conflict of individual opinions and passions, is preserved in the epitome, so that the book has the interest which clings to all accounts of verbal battles on whose issue great principles are staked. As the words as well as the arguments of the debates are given, and as the sentences chosen are those in which the characters of the speakers find expression, the effect is often dramatic. It cannot fail to be observed, in reading these reports, that there is a prevailing vulgarity of tone in the declarations of the champions of Slavery. They boldly avow the lowest and most selfish views in the coarsest languages and scout and deride all elevation of feeling and thought in matters affecting the rights of the poor and oppressed. Their opinions outrage civility as well as Christianity; and while they make a boast of being gentlemen, they hardly rise above the prejudices of boors. Principles which have become truisms, and which it is a disgrace for an educated man not to admit, they boldly denounce as pestilent paradoxes; and in reading Mr. Wilson's book an occasional shock of shame must be felt by the most imperturbable politician, at the spectacle of the legislature of "a model republic" experiencing a fierce resistance in the attempt to establish indisputable truths.
Most of the questions here vehemently discussed should, it might be supposed, be settled without discussion by the plain average sense and conscience of any body of men deserving to live in the nineteenth century; but so completely have the defenders of Slavery substituted will and passion for reason and morality, and so long have they been accustomed to have their insolent absurdities rule the politics of the nation, that the passage of the bills whose varying fortunes Mr. Wilson records must be considered the greatest triumph of liberty and justice which our legislative annals afford. And in that triumph the historian of the Anti-Slavery Measures may justly claim to have had a distinguished part. Honest, able, industrious, intelligent, indefatigable, zealous for his cause, yet flexible to events, gifted at once with practical sagacity and strong convictions, and with his whole heart and mind absorbed in the business of politics and legislation, he has proved himself an excellent workman in that difficult task by which facts are made to take the impress of ideas, and the principles of equity are embodied in the laws of the land.