"Saying, 'We will brook no longer,
That King Cotton bound should be:
Be his gaolers strong, we're stronger,
In our hunger o'er sea—
More for want, than love, uprisen,
We are come to break his prison!'
"Welcome even such releasing,
Fain my work I'd be about:
Soon would want and wail be ceasing,
Were King Cotton once let out—
Though all torn and faint and bleeding,
Millions still I've strength for feeding."
Then came an episode which did for the moment set John Bull and Punch on a nobler basis. All during the Trent affair—when the United States was obviously wrong in arresting the Confederate Commissioners, Mason and Slidell, on board an English ship—the Tenniel cartoons rose to the higher level of just indignation.
Even now, however, Punch was unable or unwilling to see the magnanimity of Abraham Lincoln's apology for an error not his own.
This was all the more unjust because Punch was both able and willing to discriminate between the level-headed men of the North and the jingoes, as this extract will show.
OUR DEAR BROTHER JONATHAN
This delightful ebullition of fervent brotherly love has most fittingly appeared in a Philadelphia paper:—
"It may be, in view of all these grave considerations and the sad necessities of the case, that, in order to avoid a war which could only end in our discomfiture, the Administration may be compelled to concede the demands of England, and perhaps release Messrs. Mason and Slidell. God forbid!—but in a crisis like this we must adapt ourselves to stern circumstances, and yield every feeling of pride to maintain our existence. If this contingency should ever arise—and I am only speculating upon a disagreeable possibility—then let us swear, not only to ourselves but our children who come after us, to repay this greedy, insolent, and cowardly Power with the retribution of a just and fearful vengeance. If England in our time of distress makes herself our foe, and offers to be our assassin, we will treat her as a foe when we can do so untrammeled and unmenaced by another enemy."
"Greedy, insolent, and cowardly," these are nice fraternal terms; and what a truly loving spirit is evinced by swearing "fearful vengeance" upon the "assassin," and handing to posterity the keeping of the oath!
No whit less affectionate in feeling is what follows:—