From that time nearly to this the literary relations between England and America have been growing more and more intimate, until every English writer of repute reckoned upon his great circle of readers in the United States, and every native author of a certain distinction depended upon a welcome, more or less cordial, but still a welcome, from a British reading constituency.
Never had the mutual interchange of literary gifts from the one people to the other been so active as during the years preceding the outbreak of the Great Conspiracy. So close was the communication of thought and feeling, that it seemed as if there were hardly need of a submarine cable to stretch its nervous strands between two national brains that were locked in Siamese union by the swift telegraph of thought. We reprinted each other's books, we made new reputations for each other's authors, we wrote in each other's magazines, and introduced each other's young writers to our own several publics. Thought echoed to thought, voice answered to voice across the Atlantic.
But for one fatal stain upon our institutions,—a stain of which we were constantly reminded, as the one thing that shamed all our pretensions,—it seemed as if the peaceful and prosperous development of the great nation sprung from the loins of England were accepted as a gain to universal civilization. In the fulness of time the heir of Great Britain's world-shadowing empire came among us to receive the wide and cordial welcome which we could afford to give without compromising our republicanism, and he to receive without lessening his dignity. It was the seal upon the entente cordiale which seemed to have at last established itself between the thinkers as well as the authorities of the two countries.
A few months afterwards came the great explosion which threatened the eternal rending asunder of the Union. That the British people had but an imperfect understanding of the quarrel, we are ready to believe. That they were easily misled as to some of the motives and intentions of the North is plain enough. But this one fact remains: Every one of them knew, by public, official statements, that what the South meant to do was to build a new social and political order on Slavery,—recognized, proclaimed, boasted of, theoretically justified, and practically incorporated with its very principle of existence. They might have their doubts about the character of the North, but they could have none about the principles or intentions of the South. That ought to have settled the question for civilized Europe. It would have done so, but that jealousy of the great self-governing state swallowed up every other consideration.
We will not be unjust nor ungrateful. We have as true friends, as brave and generous advocates of our sacred cause, in Great Britain as our fathers found in their long struggle for liberty. We have the intelligent coöperation of a few leading thinkers, and the instinctive sympathy of a large portion of the people,—may God be merciful to them and to their children in the day of reckoning, which, sooner or later, awaits a nation that is false to advancing civilization!
But, with all our gratitude to the noble few who have pleaded our cause, we are obliged to own that we have looked in vain for sympathy in many quarters where we should assuredly have expected it. Where is the English Church in this momentous struggle? Has it blasted with its anathema the rising barbarism, threatening, or rather promising, to nationalize itself, which, as a cardinal principle, denies the Word of God and the sanctities of the marriage relation to millions of its subjects? or does it save its indignation for the authors of "Essays and Reviews" and the over-curious Bishop of Natal? Where are the men whose voices ought to ring like clarions among the hosts of their brethren in the Free States of the North? Where is Lord Brougham, ex-apostle of the Diffusion of Knowledge, while the question is of enforced perpetual ignorance as the cement of that unhallowed structure with which this nineteenth century is to be outraged, if treason has its way? Where is Dickens, the hater of the lesser wrongs of Chancery Courts, the scourge of tyrannical beadles and heartless schoolmasters? Has he no word for those who are striving, bleeding, dying, to keep from spreading itself over a continent a system which legalizes outrages almost too fearful to be told even to those who know all that is darkest in the record of English pauperism and crime? Where is the Laureate, so full of fine indignations and high aspirations? Has he, who holds so cheap those who waste their genius
"To make old baseness picturesque,"
no single stanza for the great strife of this living century? is he too busy with his old knights to remember that
"One great clime....
Yet rears her crest, unconquered and sublime,
Above the far Atlantic?"
has he a song for the six hundred, and not a line for the six hundred thousand? Where is the London "Times," so long accepted as the true index of English intelligence and enlightened humanity? Where are those grave organs of thought which were always quarrelling with Slavery so long as it was the thorn in the breast of our nation, but almost do homage to it now that it is a poisoned arrow aimed at her life? Where is the little hunchback's journal, whose wit was the dog-vane of fashionable opinion, once pointing towards freedom as the prevailing wind seemed to blow, now veered round to obey the poisoned breath of Slavery? All silent or hostile, subject as they are themselves to the overmastering influence of a class which dreads the existence of a self-governing state, like this majestic Union, worse than falsehood, worse than shame, worse than robbery, worse than complicity with the foulest of rebellions, worse than partnership in the gigantic scheme which was to blacken half a hemisphere with the night of eternal Slavery!