England has diplomatic connections—she has sometimes diplomatic intrigues—with the Great Powers of Europe. For a real alliance she must look here. Strong as is the element of aristocracy in her Government, there is that in her, nevertheless, which makes her cordial understandings with military despotisms little better than smothered hate. With you she may have a league of the heart. We are united by blood. We are united by a common allegiance to the cause of freedom. You may think that English freedom falls far short of yours. You will allow that it goes beyond any yet attained by the great European nations, and that to those nations it has been and still is a light of hope. I see it treated with contempt here. It is not treated with contempt by Garibaldi. It is not treated with contempt by the exiles from French despotism, who are proud to learn the English tongue, and who find in our land, as they think, the great asylum of the free. Let England and America quarrel. Let your weight be cast into the scale against us, when we struggle with the great conspiracy of absolutist powers around us, and the hope of freedom in Europe would be almost quenched. Hampden and Washington in arms against each other! What could the Powers of Evil desire more? When Americans talk lightly of a war with England, one desires to ask them what they believe the effects of such a war would be on their own country. How many more American wives do they wish to make widows? How many more American children do they wish to make orphans? Do they deem it wise to put a still greater strain on the already groaning timbers of the Constitution? Do they think that the suspension of trade and emigration, with the price of labor rising and the harvests of Illinois excluded from their market, would help you to cope with the financial difficulties which fill with anxiety every reflecting mind? Do they think that four more years of war-government would render easy the tremendous work of reconstruction? But the interests of the great community of nations are above the private interests of America or of England. If war were to break out between us, what would become of Italy, abandoned without help to her Austrian enemy and her sinister protector? What would become of the last hopes of liberty in France? What would become of the world?
English liberties, imperfect as they may be,—and as an English Liberal of course thinks they are,—are the source from which your liberties have flowed, though the river may be more abundant than the spring. Being in America, I am in England,—not only because American hospitality makes me feel that I am still in my own country, but because our institutions are fundamentally the same. The great foundations of constitutional government, legislative assemblies, parliamentary representation, personal liberty, self-taxation, the freedom of the press, allegiance to the law as a power above individual will,—all these were established, not without memorable efforts and memorable sufferings, in the land from which the fathers of your republic came. You are living under the Great Charter, the Petition of Eight, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Libel Act. Perhaps you have not even yet taken from us all that, if a kindly feeling continues between us, you may find it desirable to take. England by her eight centuries of constitutional progress has done a great work for you, and the two nations may yet have a great work to do together for themselves and for the world. A student of history, knowing how the race has struggled and stumbled onwards through the ages until now, cannot believe in the finality and perfection of any set of institutions, not even of yours. This vast electioneering apparatus, with its strange machinery and discordant sounds, in the midst of which I find myself,—it may be, and I firmly believe it is, better for its purpose than anything that has gone before it; but is it the crowning effort of mankind? If our creed—the Liberal creed—be true, American institutions are a great step in advance of the Old World; but they are not a miraculous leap into a political millennium. They are a momentous portion of that continual onward effort of humanity which it is the highest duty of history to trace; but they are not its final consummation. Model Republic! How many of these models has the course of ages seen broken and flung disdainfully aside! You have been able to do great things for the world because your forefathers did great things for you. The generation will come which in its turn will inherit the fruits of your efforts, add to them a little of its own, and in the plenitude of its self-esteem repay you with ingratitude. The time will come when the memory of the Model Republicans of the United States, as well as that of the narrow Parliamentary Reformers of England, will appeal to history, not in vain, to rescue it from the injustice of posterity, and extend to it the charities of the past.
New-comers among the nations, you desire, like the rest, to have a history. You seek it in Indian annals, you seek it in Northern sagas. You fondly surround an old windmill with the pomp of Scandinavian antiquity, in your anxiety to fill up the void of your unpeopled past. But you have a real and glorious history, if you will not reject it,—monuments genuine and majestic, if you will acknowledge them as your own. Yours are the palaces of the Plantagenets,—the cathedrals which enshrined our old religion,—the illustrious hall in which the long line of our great judges reared, by their decisions, the fabric of our law,—the gray colleges in which our intellect and science found their earliest home,—the graves where our heroes and sages and poets sleep. It would as ill become you to cultivate narrow national memories in regard to the past as it would to cultivate narrow national prejudices at present. You have come out, as from other relics of barbarism which still oppress Europe, so from the barbarism of jealous nationality. You are heirs to all the wealth of the Old World, and must owe gratitude for a part of your heritage to Germany, France, and Spain, as well as to England. Still, it is from England that you are sprung; from her you brought the power of self-government which was the talisman of colonization and the pledge of your empire here. She it was, that, having advanced by centuries of effort to the front of the Old World, became worthy to give birth to the New. From England you are sprung; and if the choice were given you among all the nations of the world, which would you rather choose for a mother?
England bore you, and bore you not without a mother's pangs. For the real hour of your birth wag the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, at once the saddest and the noblest period of English history,—the noblest, whether we look to the greatness of the principles at stake, or to the grandeur of the actors who fill the scene. This is not the official version of your origin. The official version makes you the children of the revolutionary spirit which was abroad in the eighteenth century and culminated in the French Revolution. But this robs you of a century and a half of antiquity, and of more than a century and a half of greatness. Since 1783 you have had a marvellous growth of population and of wealth,—things not to be spoken of, as cynics have spoken of them, without thankfulness, since the added myriads have been happy, and the wealth has flowed not to a few, but to all. But before 1783 you had founded, under the name of an English Colony, a community emancipated from feudalism; you had abolished here and doomed to general abolition hereditary aristocracy, and that which is the essential basis of hereditary aristocracy, primogeniture in the inheritance of land. You had established, though under the semblance of dependence on the English crown, a virtual sovereignty of the people. You had created the system of common schools, in which the sovereignty of the people has its only safe foundation. You had proclaimed, after some misgivings and backslidings, the doctrine of liberty of conscience, and released the Church from her long bondage to the State. All this you had achieved while you still were, and gloried in being, a colony of England. You have done great things, since your quarrel with George III., for the world as well as for yourselves. But for the world, perhaps, you had done greater things before.
In England the Revolution of the seventeenth century failed. It failed, at least, as an attempt to establish social equality and liberty of conscience. The feudal past, with a feudal Europe to support it, sat too heavy on us to be cast off. By a convulsive effort we broke loose, for a moment, from the hereditary aristocracy and the hierarchy. For a moment we placed a popular chief in power, though Cromwell was obliged by circumstances, as well as impelled by his own ambition, to make himself a king. But when Cromwell died before his hour, all was over for many a day with the party of religious freedom and of the people. The nation had gone a little way out of the feudal and hierarchical Egypt; but the horrors of the unknown Wilderness, and the memory of the flesh-pots, overpowered the hope of the Promised Land; and the people returned to the rule of Pharaoh and his priests amidst the bonfires of the Restoration. Something had been gained. Kings became more careful how they cut the subject's purse; bishops, how they clipped the subject's ears. Instead of being carried by Laud to Rome, we remained Protestants after a sort, though without liberty of conscience. Our Parliament, such as it was, with a narrow franchise and rotten boroughs, retained its rights; and in time we secured the independence of the judges and the integrity of an aristocratic law. But the great attempt had miscarried. English society had made a supreme effort to escape from feudalism and the hierarchy into social justice and religious freedom, and that effort had failed.
Failed in England, but succeeded here. The yoke which in the mother-country we had not strength to throw off, in the colony we escaped; and here, beyond the reach of the Restoration, Milton's vision proved true, and a free community was founded, though in a humble and unsuspected form, which depended on the life of no single chief, and lived on when Cromwell died. Milton, when the night of the Restoration closed on the brief and stormy day of his party, bated no jot of hope. He was strong in that strength of conviction which assures spirits like his of the future, however dark the present may appear. But, could he have beheld it, the morning, moving westward in the track of the Puritan emigrants, had passed from his hemisphere only to shine again in this with no fitful ray, but with a steady brightness which will one day reillumine the feudal darkness of the Old World.
The Revolution failed in England. Yet in England the party of Cromwell and Milton still lives. It still lives; and in this great crisis of your fortunes, its heart turns to you. On your success ours depends. Now, as in the seventeenth century, the thread of our fate is twined with the thread of yours. An English Liberal comes here, not only to watch the unfolding of your destiny, but to read his own.
Even in the Revolution of 1776 Liberal England was on your side. Chatham was your spokesman, as well as Patrick Henry. We, too, reckon Washington among our heroes. Perhaps there may have been an excuse even for the King. The relation of dependence which you as well as he professed to hold sacred, and which he was bound to maintain, had long become obsolete. It was time to break the cord which held the child to its mother; and probably there were some on your side, from the first, or nearly from the first, resolved to break it,—men instinct with the revolutionary spirit, and bent on a Republic. All parties were in a false position; and they could find no way out of it better than civil war. Good-will, not hatred, is the law of the world; and seldom can history—even the history of the conqueror—look back on the results of war without regret. England, scarcely guilty of the offence of her monarch, drank the cup of shame and disaster to the dregs. That war ruined the French finances, which till then might have been retrieved, past the hope of redemption, and precipitated the Revolution which hurled France through anarchy into despotism, and sent Lafayette to a foreign dungeon, and his master to the block. You came out victorious; but, from the violence of the rupture, you took a political bias not perhaps entirely for good; and the necessity of the war blended you, under equivocal conditions, with other colonies of a wholly different origin and character, which then "held persons to service," and are now your half-dethroned tyrant, the Slave Power. This Revolution will lead to a revision of many things,—perhaps to a partial revision of your history. Meantime, let me repeat, England counts Washington among her heroes.
And now as to the conduct of England towards you in this civil war. It is of want of sympathy, if of anything, on our part, not of want of interest, that you have a right to complain. Never, within my memory, have the hearts of Englishmen been so deeply moved by any foreign struggle as by this civil war,—not even, if I recollect aright, by the great European earthquake of 1848. I doubt whether they were more moved by the Indian mutiny or by our war with Russia. It seemed that history had brought round again the great crisis of the Thirty Years' War, when all England throbbed with the mortal struggle waged between the powers of Liberty and Slavery on their German battle-field; for expectation can scarcely have been more intense when Gustavus and Tilly were approaching each other at Leipsic than it was when Meade and Lee were approaching each other at Gettysburg. Severed from us by the Atlantic, while other nations are at our door, you are still nearer to us than all the world beside.
It is of want of sympathy, not of want of interest, that you have to complain. And the sympathy which has been withheld is not that of the whole nation, but that of certain classes, chiefly of the class against whose political interest you are fighting, and to whom your victory brings eventual defeat. The real origin of your nation is the key to the present relations between you and the different parties in England. This is the old battle waged again on a new field. We will not talk too much of Puritans and Cavaliers. The soldiers of the Union are not Puritans, neither are the planters Cavaliers, But the present civil war is a vast episode in the same irrepressible conflict between Aristocracy and Democracy; and the heirs of the Cavalier in England sympathize with your enemies, the heirs of the Puritan with you.