We are all of us in the habit of using words so carelessly, that it will help us to limit their vagueness as here employed. We speak of "England" for Great Britain, for the simple reason that Ireland is but a reluctant alien she drags after her, and Scotland only her most thriving province. We are not surprised, for instance, when "Blackwood" echoes the abusive language of the metropolitan journals, for it is only as a village-cur joins the hounds that pass in full cry. So, when we talk of "the attitude of England," we have a tolerably defined idea, made up of the collective aspect of the unsympathetic Government, of the mendacious and insolent press, of the mercenary trading allies of the Rebels, of the hostile armaments which have sailed from British ports, of the undisguised enmity of many of her colonists, neighbors of the North as well as neighbors of the South; all of which shape themselves into an image having very much the look of representing the nation,—certainly much more the look of it than the sum of all those manifestations which indicate sympathy with the cause of the North.
The attitude of England, then, has been such, since the Rebellion began, as to alienate much of the affection still remaining among us for the mother-country. It has gone far towards finishing that process of separation of the child from the parent which two centuries of exile and two long wars had failed to complete. But, looking at the matter more clearly, we shall find that our causes of complaint must be very unequally distributed among the different classes of the British people.
The Government has carefully measured out to us, in most cases certainly, strict, technical justice. It could not well do otherwise, for it knows the force of precedents. But we have an unpleasing sense that our due, as an ally and a Christian nation, striving against an openly proclaimed heathen conspiracy, has been paid us grudgingly, tardily, sparingly, while our debt, as in the case of the Rebel emissaries, has been extorted fiercely, swiftly, and to the last farthing. We have recognized a change, it is true, ever since Earl Russell gave the hint that our cause was more popular in England than that of the South. We have gratefully accepted the friendly acts already alluded to. Better late than not at all. But the past cannot be undone. British "neutrality" has strengthened the arms that have been raised against our national life, and winged the bloody messengers that have desolated our households. Still, every act of justice which has even a show of good-will in it is received only too graciously by a people which has known what it is to be deserted by its friends in the hour of need. Whatever be the motives of the altered course of the British Government,—an awakened conscience, or a series of "Federal" successes,—Mr. Sumner's arguments, or General Gillmore's long-range practice,—a more careful study of the statistics of Slavery, or of the lists of American iron-clad steamers,—we welcome it at once; we take the offered hand, if not with warm pressure, at least with decent courtesy. We only regret that forbearance and good offices, and that moral influence which would have been almost as important as an offensive and defensive alliance, had not come before the flower of our youth was cut down in the battle-field, and mourning and misery had entered half the families of the land.
The British aristocracy, with all its dependent followers, cannot help being against us. The bearing which our success would have on its interests is obvious enough, and we cannot wonder that the instinct of self-preservation opens its eyes to the remote consequences which will be likely to flow from the continued and prosperous existence of the regenerated, self-governing Union. The privileged classes feel to our labor- and money-saving political machinery just as the hand-weavers felt to the inventor and introducers of the power-loom. The simple fact is, that, if a great nation like ours can govern itself, they are not needed, and Nobility has a nightmare of Jews going about the streets with half a dozen coronets on their heads, one over another, like so many old beavers. What can we expect of the law-spinning heir-loom owners, but that they should wish to break this new-fangled machine, and exterminate its contrivers? The right to defend its life is the claim of everything that lives, and we must not lose our temper because the representatives of an hereditary ruling class wish to preserve those privileges which are their very existence, nor because they have foresight enough to know, that, if the Western Continent remains the seat of a vast, thriving, irresistible, united republic, the days of their life, as an order, are numbered.
"The people," as Mr. Motley has said, in one of his official letters, "everywhere sympathize with us; for they know that our cause is that of free institutions,—that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy." We have evidence that this is partially true of the British people. But we know also how much they are influenced by their political and social superiors, and we know, too, what base influences have been long at work to corrupt their judgment and inflame their prejudices. We have too often had occasion to see that the middle classes had been reached by the passions of their superiors, or infected by the poison instilled by traitorous emissaries. We have been struck with this particularly in some of the British colonies. It is the livid gleam of a reflected hatred they shed upon us; but the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence, and we feel sure that the British inhabitants of an African cape or of a West-India islet would not have presumed to sympathize with the Rebels, unless they had known that it was respectable, if not fashionable, to do so at home. It is one of the most painful illustrations of the influence of a privileged class that the opinions and prejudices and interests of the English aristocracy should have been so successfully imposed upon a large portion of the people, for whom the North was fighting over again the battles of that long campaign which will never end until the rightful Sovereigns have dispossessed the whole race of Pretenders.
The effect of this course on the part of the mother-country has been like that of harsh treatment upon children generally. It chills their affections, lessens their respect for the parental authority, interrupts their friendly intercourse, and perhaps drives them from the family-mansion. But it cannot destroy the ties of blood and the recollections of the past. It cannot deprive the "old home" of its charm. If there has been but a single member of the family beneath its roof who has remained faithful and kind, all grateful memories will cluster about that one, though the hearts of the rest were hard as the nether millstone.
The soil of England will always be dearer to us of English descent than any except our own. The Englishman will always be more like one of ourselves than any "foreigner" can be. We shall never cease to feel the tenderest regard for those Englishmen who have stood by us like brothers in the day of trial. They have hardly guessed in our old home how sacred to us is the little island from which our fathers were driven into the wilderness,—not saying, with the Separatists, "Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome!" but "Farewell, dear England!" At that fearful thought of the invasion of her shores,—a thought which rises among the spectral possibilities of the future,—we seem to feel a dull aching in the bones of our forefathers that lie beneath her green turf, as old soldiers feel pain in the limbs they have left long years ago on the battle-field.
But hard treatment often proves the most useful kind of discipline. One good effect, so far as we are concerned, that will arise from the harsh conduct of England, will be the promotion of our intellectual and moral independence. We declared our political independence a good while ago, but this was as a small dividend is declared on a great debt. We owed a great deal more to posterity than to insure its freedom from political shackles. The American republic was to be emancipated from every Old-World prejudice that might stand in the way of its entire fulness of development according to its own law, which is in many ways different from any precedent furnished by the earlier forms of civilization. There were numerous difficulties in the way. The American talked the language of England, and found a literature ready-made to his hands. He brought his religion with him, shaped under English influences, whether he called himself Dissenter or not. He dispensed justice according to the common law of England. His public assemblies were guided by Parliamentary usage. His commerce and industry had been so long in tutelage that both required long exercise before they could know their own capacities.
The mother-country held her American colonies as bound to labor for her profit, not their own, just as an artisan claims the whole time of his apprentice. If we think the policy of England towards America in the year 1863 has been purely selfish, looking solely to her own interest, without any regard to the principles involved in our struggle, let us look back and see whether it was any different in 1763, or in 1663. If her policy has been uniform at these three periods, it is time for us to have learned our lesson.
Two hundred years ago, in the year 1663, an Act of Parliament was passed to monopolize the Colonial trade for England, for the sake, as its preamble stated, "of keeping them [the Colonies] in a firmer dependence upon it, and rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous unto it, in the further employment and increase of English shipping and seamen, vent of English woollens and other manufactures and commodities," etc. This act had, of course, the effect of increasing and perpetuating the naturally close dependence of the Colonies on the mother-country for most of the products of industry. But in an infant community the effect of such restrictions would be little felt, and it required another century before an extension of the same system was publicly recognized as being a robbery of the child by the parent. To show how far the system was carried, and what was the effect on the public mind of a course founded in pure, and, as it proved, short-sighted selfishness, it will be necessary to recall some of the details which help to account for the sudden change at last in the disposition of the Colonists.