I hastened to exculpate myself from any intention of unkind insinuation, and my watch ticked steadily on.
"If your mill turns only by a stream that flows to you through your neighbor's grounds, your neighbor has your flour at his mercy. You can grind your grist when he chooses, not when you will."
I nodded. My watch ticked on,—
"When you live on a marsh where the tide may suddenly rise house-high without warning, if you are a wise man, you will keep a boat always moored at the door."
"I certainly will," responded I, with energy.
"Very well. Every nation lives on that marsh which is called War. While war is possible,—that is to say, in any year this side of the Millennium,—there is but one sure means of safety, and that is actual independence. At this moment England is the most striking illustration of this truth. She is the most instructive warning to us, because she is the least independent and the most hated nation in the world. England and France and the United States are the three great maritime powers. We all know how much love is lost just now between England and ourselves. How is it with her ancient enemy across the Channel? The answer is contained in the reported remark of Louis Napoleon: 'Why do the English try to provoke a war with me? They know, if I should declare war against England, that there is not an old woman in France who would not sell her last shift to furnish me with means to carry it on.' Great Britain is at this moment under the most enormous bonds to keep the peace. They are the bonds of vital dependence upon the rest of the world.—Shall I stop?" asked my watch.
"No, no; lose no time; go regularly on," answered I.
"Very well; while England sneers and rages at us, let us be warned by her. She lives by her looms; but her looms and her laborers are fed from abroad. Therefore she lies at the mercy of her enemies, and she takes care never to make friends. She snarls and shows her teeth at us. She sees us desperately fighting, and yet she can neither spring nor bite. It is the moment most favorable for her to strike, but she cannot improve it. She hopes and prays for the ruin of our government, seeing, that, if it falls from internal disease, and not from a foreign blow, her most threatening political and commercial rival is overthrown. And she does not shrink from those hopes and prayers, although she knows that the result she so ardently desires will be the establishment by military power of a huge slave-empire, a counter-civilization to that of Christianity. Fear of her life makes England false and timid. Her dependence upon other nations has compelled her to abdicate her position as the head of Saxon civilization, which is the gradual enlarging of liberty as the only permanent security of universal international prosperity and peace. Indeed, it is not denied that the tone of British opinion in regard to human slavery is radically changed. That change is the measure of the timidity and sophistication, the moral deterioration inevitably produced in any people by the consciousness of its dependence for the means of labor and life upon other nations. The crack of the plantation-whip scares Washington no longer, but it pierces the heart of Westminster with terror.
"See how utterly mean and mortifying is her attitude toward us. John Bull looks across the highway of the world into his neighbor's house. 'D' ye see,' he mutters, 'that man chastising his son in his house yonder? Let's play that they are not related, and ask him what he means by assaulting an innocent passenger.' Then he turns to the rest of the people in the street, who know exactly how virtuous and mild John Bull is in his own family-relations, who have watched his tender forbearance with his eldest son Erin, and his long-suffering suavity with his youngest son India, and says to them,—'To a moral citizen of the world it is very shocking to see such an insolent attack upon a peaceable person. That man is an intolerable bully. If he were smaller, I'd step over and kick him.'—Do you feel drowsy?" asked my watch.
"I was never more awake," I answered; "but you seem to me,—although, when I look at you and think of Waltham, it is the most natural thing in the world,—yet you do seem hard upon Old England, Mother England, spite of all."