“I returned from Washington this morning. Have read your speech with great satisfaction. I think you have touched the public pulse more widely than ever before.”
The speech had a different reception in England, being criticized by the press, and by Earl Russell in a public speech.
The New York correspondent of the London Standard called Mr. Sumner “the mouthpiece of the President,” and said that the speech “had been carefully examined by the President, and was analyzed by the confidential members of the Cabinet, before being let off to the public in this great city.” This was a mistake. Neither the President nor any of his Cabinet had seen a line of the speech.
Its delivery was reported by the London Times of September 22d, in a telegraphic despatch from Greencastle, in Ireland:—
“He denounced the conduct of the British Government in permitting the building of war steamers in British ports for the Confederates and recognizing on the part of the South any belligerent rights upon the ocean. He disbelieved that either France or England would intervene in favor of a state that based itself upon Negro Slavery, and asserted that all intervention in the internal affairs of another nation was contrary to law and reason, unless such intervention were obviously on the side of human rights.”
The Times followed with an elaborate leader, undertaking to correct statements of law and fact, dwelling especially on the allegation, that, without the concession of belligerent rights, the supply of munitions of war to rebels would have been a violation of English law. Here Mr. Sumner had the authority of the English Law Lords in Parliament, openly declaring that without such concession the building of a Rebel ship in England would have been under the penalties of piracy, and it is difficult to see why a corresponding penalty would not have followed the supply of munitions of war. In each case the article is supplied for offence against a friendly power. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, remarkable for learning and good sense, has said: “The law of England recognizes the principle of protecting a foreign government by its own municipal regulations”[169]; and he refers to the trials for libels on foreign sovereigns, and also to the proceedings in 1858 against Simon Bernard, the Frenchman, indicted for a plot to assassinate the Emperor Louis Napoleon, in supplying the grenades used by Orsini in his attempt. In the latter case, Lord Chief Justice Campbell said to the jury: “If you believe that he, as there is strong evidence to show, being acquainted with Allsop’s views, and knowing that Allsop had got these grenades, assisted in having them, transported to Brussels,—if you believe that he bought in this country the materials for making the fulminating powder with which these grenades were charged,—if you believe, that, living in this country, and owing a temporary allegiance to the sovereign of this country, he sent over the revolvers with the view that they should be used in the plot against the Emperor of the French, … it will be a fair inference, I think, to draw, that he had a guilty knowledge of that plot.”[170] Though this judgment was in the case of a conspiracy to take the life of a foreign sovereign, it is not easy to see why the same principle is not applicable to a conspiracy against a friendly power. To this case may be added the authority of Lord Lyndhurst, who laid it down in debate, with the concurrence of other Law Lords, that a conspiracy in the United Kingdom, either by native subjects or aliens, to do any act, either at home or abroad, tending to embroil the Government with that of any foreign country, is a misdemeanor.[171] Is a rebellion without belligerent rights different from a conspiracy? Its nature was changed by the Queen’s Proclamation, which not only helped the Rebels, but created a new set of customers.
The character of the leader in the Times appears in its conclusion:—
“We believe our readers have by this time had enough of the logic of Mr. Sumner. It is based neither on law nor on fact, but upon his own sympathies and antipathies, which he is pleased to assume must also be ours, on the supposition, which we do not admit, that the North are obviously in the right, and on the inference, which we refuse to draw, that, even if the North are in the right, we are bound to violate the laws of neutrality in order to assist them.”
The Daily News, of London, in its first notice, said:—