OUR PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENCE.
It is among the possibilities of the future, that, in due course of time, the United States of America shall become to England what England has become to Saxony. We cannot be sure, it is true, that the mother-country will live, a prosperous and independent kingdom, to see the full maturity of her gigantic offspring. We have no right to assume it as a matter of course, that the Western Autocracy will fill up, unbroken, the outline traced for it by Nature and history. But England, forced as her civilization must be considered ever since the Conquest, has a reasonable chance for another vigorous century, and the Union, the present storm once weathered, does not ask a longer time than this to become, according to the prediction of the London "Times," the master-power of the planet.
The class that guides the destinies of Great Britain and her dependencies is far-reaching in its anticipations as it is deep-rooted in its recollections. Quantum radice in Tartara, tantum vertice ad auras,—if we may invert the poet's words. An American millionnaire may be anxious about the condition of his grandchildren, but a peer whose ancestors came in with the Conqueror looks ahead at least as far as the end of the twentieth century. The royal astrologers have cast the horoscope of the nationality born beneath the evening-star, and report it as being ominous for that which finds its nativity in the House of Leo.
Every dynasty sees a natural enemy in a self-governing state. Its dread of that enemy is in exact proportion to the amount of liberty enjoyed by its own people. Freedom is the ferment of Freedom. The moistened sponge drinks up water greedily; the dry one sheds it. Russia has no popular legislation, and her Emperor almost, perhaps quite, loves us. England boasts of her freeborn people, and her governing class, to say the least, does not love us.
An unexpected accident of situation startled us by the revelation of a secret which had been, on the whole, very well kept. No play of mirrors in a story, no falling of a screen in a comedy, no flash of stage-lightning in a melodrama, ever betrayed a lover's or a murderer's hidden thought and purpose more strikingly than the over-hasty announcement that the Union was broken into warring fragments, never again to be joined together, unveiled the cherished hope of its Old-World enemies. The whispers of expectant heirs at the opening of a miser's will are decorous and respectful, compared to the chuckle of the leading English social and political organ and its echoes, when the bursting of the Republican "bubble" was proclaimed as an accomplished fact, and the hour was thought to have come when the "Disunited States" could be held up as a spectacle to the people of Europe. A Te Deum in Westminster Abbey would hardly have added emphasis to the expression of what appeared to be the prevailing sentiment of the upper classes.
If the comparative prudence of the British Government had not tempered this exultant movement, the hopes of civilization would have been blasted by such a war as it is sickening to think of: England in alliance with an empire trying to spread and perpetuate Slavery as its very principle of life, against a people whose watchwords were freedom, education, and the dignity of labor. If the silent masses of the British people had not felt that our cause was theirs, there would have been no saying how far the passionate desire to see their predictions made facts might have led the proud haters of popular government.
Between these two forces the British Cabinet has found a diagonal which has met with the usual success of compromises. The aristocracy, which very naturally wishes to see the Union divided, is in a fair way of being disappointed, because, as its partisans may claim, England did not force herself into our quarrel. That portion of the middling classes which could not tolerate the thought of a Slave Empire has been compelled to witness a deliberate exposure in the face of the whole world of the hollowness of those philanthropic pretensions which have been so long the boast of British patriots. The people of the Union, who expected moral support and universal indignant repudiation of the slaveholding Rebel conspiracy, have been disgusted and offended. The Rebels, who supposed Great Britain, and perhaps France also, would join them in a war which was virtually a crusade against free institutions, have been stung into a second paroxysm of madness. Western Europe failed us in the storm; it leaves them in the moment of shipwreck.
The recent action of the British Government, under the persuasive influence of Mr. Seward's polite representation, that instant hostilities would be sure to follow, if England did not keep her iron pirates at home, has improved somewhat the tone of Northern feeling towards her. The late neighborly office of the Canadian Government, in warning us of the conspiracy to free our prisoners, has produced a very favorable impression, so far as the effect of a single act is felt in striking the balance of a long account.
We can, therefore, examine some of our relations with Great Britain in a better temper now than we could do some months ago, when we never went to sleep without thinking that before morning we might be shelled out of our beds by a fleet of British iron-clad steamers. But though we have been soothed, and in some measure conciliated, by the change referred to, there is no such thing possible as returning to the status quo ante bellum. We can never feel in all respects to England as we felt of old. This is a fact which finds expression in so many forms that it is natural to wish to see how deep it lies: whether it is an effect of accidental misunderstanding and collision of interests, or whether it is because the events of the last few years have served to bring to light the organic, inherent, and irreconcilable antagonism of the two countries.