It is the miserable defection of so many of the thinking class, in this time of the greatest popular struggle known to history, which impresses us far more than the hostility of a few land-grasping nobles, or the coldness of a Government mainly guided by their counsels. The natural consequence has been the complete destruction of that undue deference to foreign judgments which was so long a characteristic of our literature. The current English talk about the affairs that now chiefly interest us excites us very moderately. The leading organs of thought have lost their hold upon the mind of most thinking people among us. We have learned to distrust the responses of their timeserving oracles, and to laugh at the ignorant pretensions of their literary artisans. These "outsiders" have shown, to our entire satisfaction, that they are thoroughly incompetent to judge our character as a community, and that they have no true estimate of its spirit and its resources. The view they have taken of the strife in which we have been and are engaged is not only devoid of any high moral sympathy, but utterly shallow, and flagrantly falsified by the whole course of events, political, financial, and military.
Perhaps we ought not to be surprised or disappointed. With a congenital difference of organization, with a new theory of human rights involving a virtual reconstruction of society, with larger views of human destiny, with a virgin continent for them to be worked out in, the American should expect to be misunderstood by the civilizations of the past, based on a quagmire of pauperism and ignorance, or overhung by an avalanche of revolution. Other peoples, emerging from, a condition of serfdom, retaining many of the instincts of a conquered race, get what liberty they have by extorting it piecemeal from their masters. Magna Charta was forced from a weak monarch by a conspiracy of nobles, acting from purely selfish motives, in behalf of their own order. The Habeas Corpus Act was unpalatable to the Lords, and was passed only by a trick or a blunder. What is there in common between the states which recognize the rule of any persons who happen to be descended from the bold or artful men who obtained their power by violence or fraud, and a state which starts with the assumption that the government belongs to the governed, subject, we must remember, to the laws which make a people a nation,—laws recognized just as unhesitatingly by the Rebel States as applying to Western Virginia or East Tennessee, as the Union recognizes their application to these same Rebel States?
Of course, it is conceivable that we are all wrong in our theory of human rights and our plan of government. It is possible that the true principle of selecting the rulers of a nation is to take the descendants of the cut-throat, the assassin, the poisoner, the traitor, who got his foot upon a people's neck some centuries ago. It may be that there is an American people which will hold itself fortunate, if it can be ruled over by a descendant of Charles V.,—though Philip II. was the son of that personage, and an American historian has made us familiar with his doings, and those of his vicegerent, the Duke of Alva. If this is the way that people should be governed, then we are wrong, and have no right to look for sympathy from Old-World dynasties. The only question is, How soon it will be safe to send a Grand Duke over to govern us.
But if our theory of human rights and our plan of government are the true ones, then our success is the inevitable downfall of every dynasty on the face of the earth. It is not our fault that this must be so; the blameless fact of our existence, prosperity, power, civilization, culture, as they will show themselves on the supposition that we are working in the divine parallels, will necessarily revolutionize all the empirical and accidental systems which have come down to us from the splendid semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. What all good men desire, here and everywhere, is that this necessary change may be effected gradually and peaceably. We do not find fault with men for being born in positions that confer powers upon them incommensurate with their rights. We do not wish to cut a man's head off because he comes of a dull race that has been taught for generations to think itself better than the rest of mankind, and has learned to believe it and practise on it. But if nations are fast becoming educated to a state in which they are competent to manage their own interests, we wish these privileged personages to recognize it, for their own sake, as well as for that of the people.
The spirit of republican America is not that of a wild propagandism. It is not by war that we have sought or should ever seek to convert the Old World to our theories and practice in government. If this young nation is permitted, in the Providence of God, to unfold all its possibilities into powers, the great lesson it will teach will be that of peaceful development. Where the public wealth is mainly for the governing class, the splendid machinery of war is as necessary as the jewels which a province would hardly buy are to the golden circlet that is the mark of sovereignty. Where the wealth of a country is for the people, this particular form of pyrotechnics is too costly to be indulged in for amusement. American civilization hates war, as such. It values life, because it honors humanity. It values property, because property is for the comfort and good of all, and not merely plunder, to be wasted by a few irresponsible lawgivers. It wants all the forces of its population to subdue Nature to its service. It demands all the intellect of its children for construction, not for destruction. Its business is to build the world's great temple of concord and justice; and for this it is not Dahlgren and Parrott that are the architects, but men of thought, of peace, of love.
Let us not, therefore, waste our strength in threats of vengeance against those misguided governments who mistook their true interest in the prospect of our calamity. We can conquer them by peace better than by war. When the Union emerges from the battle-smoke,—her crest towering over the ruins of traitorous cities and the wrecks of Rebel armies, her eye flashing defiance to all her evil-wishers, her breast heaving under its corselet of iron, her arm wielding the mightiest enginery that was ever forged into the thunderbolts of war,—her triumph will be grand enough without her setting fire to the stubble with which the folly of the Old World has girt its thrones. No deeper humiliation could be asked for our foreign enemies than the spectacle of our triumph. If we have any legal claims against the accomplices of pirates, they will be presented, and they will be paid. If there are any uncomfortable precedents which have been introduced into international law, the jealous "Mistress of the Seas" must be prepared to face them in her own hour of trouble. Had her failings but leaned to Freedom's side,—had she but been true to her traditions, to her professions, to her pretended principles,—where could she have found a truer ally than her own offspring, in the time of trial which is too probably preparing for her? "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!" No tardy repentance can efface the record of the past. We may forgive, but history is inexorable.
England was startled the other day by an earthquake. The fast-anchored isle was astonished at such a tropical phenomenon. It was all very well for Jamaica or Manila, but who would have thought of solid, constitutional England shaking like a jelly? The London "Times" moralized about it in these words:—"We see, afar off, a great empire, that had threatened to predominate over all mankind, suddenly broken up by moral agencies, and shattered into no one knows how many fragments. We are safe from that fate, at least so we deem ourselves, for never were we so united." "A great empire, that had threatened to predominate over all mankind." That was the trouble. That was the reason the "Times" was so pleased to say, a few months ago, "The bubble has burst." How, if the great empire should prove not to have been shattered? how, if the bubble has not burst?—nay, if that great system of intelligent self-government which was taken for a bubble prove to be a sphere of adamant, rounded in the mould of Divine Law, and filled with the pure light of Heaven?
England is happy in a virtuous queen; but what if another profligate like George IV. should, by the accident of birth, become the heir of her sovereignty? France is as strong as one man's life can make her; but what if that man should run against some fanatic's idea which had taken shape in a bullet-mould, or receive a sudden call from that pale visitor who heeds no challenge from the guards at the gate of the Tuileries, and stalks unannounced through antechambers and halls of audience?
The "Times" might have found a moral for the earthquake nearer home. The flame that sweeps our prairies is terrible, but it only scorches the surface. What all the governments based on smothered pauperism, tolerated ignorance, and organized degradation have to fear is the subterranean fire, which finds its vent in blazing craters, or breaks up all the ancient landmarks in earth-shattering convulsions. God forbid that we should invoke any such catastrophe even for those who have been hardest upon us in our bitter trial! Yet so surely as American society founds itself upon the rights of civilized man, there is no permanent safety for any nation but in the progressive recognition of the American principle. The right of governing a nation belongs to the people of the nation; and the urgent duty of those provisional governments which we call monarchies, empires, aristocracies is to educate their people with a view to the final surrender of all power into their hands. A little longer patience, a little more sacrifice, a little more vigorous, united action, on the part of the Loyal States, and the Union will behold herself mirrored in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the stateliest of earthly empires,—not in her own aspiring language, but by the confession of her most envious rival, predominating over all mankind. No Tartar hordes pouring from the depths of Asia, no Northern barbarians swarming out of the hive of nations, no Saracens sweeping from their deserts to plant the Crescent over the symbol of Christendom, were more terrible to the principalities and powers that stood in their way, than the Great Republic, by the bare fact of its existence, will become to every government which does not hold its authority from the people. However our present conflict may seem at first sight to do violence, in certain respects, to the principles of self-government, everybody knows that it is a strife of democratic against oligarchic institutions, of a progressive against a stationary civilization, of the rights of manhood against the claims of a class, of a national order representing the will of a people against a conspiracy organized by a sectional minority.
Just so far as the people of Europe understand the nature of our armed controversy, they will understand that we are pleading their cause. Nay, if the mass of our Southern brethren did but know it, we are pleading theirs just as much. The emancipation of industry has never taken effect in the South, and never could until labor ceased to be degrading.