The feeling of our aristocracy, as of all aristocracies, is against you. It does not follow, nor do I believe, that as a body they would desire or urge their Government to do you a wrong, whatever spirit may be shown by a few of the less honorable or more violent members of their order. With all their class sentiments, they are Englishmen, trained to walk in the paths of English policy and justice. But that their feelings should be against you is not strange. You are fighting, not for the restoration of the Union, not for the emancipation of the negro, but for Democracy against Aristocracy; and this fact is thoroughly understood by both parties throughout the Old World. As the champions of Democracy, you may claim, and you receive, the sympathy of the Democratic party in England and in Europe; that of the Aristocratic party you cannot claim. You must bear it calmly, if the aristocracies mourn over your victories and triumph over your defeats. Do the friends of Democracy conceal their joy when a despotism or an oligarchy bites the dust?
The members of our aristocracy bear you no personal hatred. An American going among them even now meets with nothing but personal courtesy and kindness. Under ordinary circumstances they are not indifferent to your good-will, nor unconscious of the tie of blood. But to ask them entirely to forget their order would be too much. In the success of a commonwealth founded on social and political equality all aristocracies must read their doom. Not by arms, but by example, you are a standing menace to the existence of political privilege. And the thread of that existence is frail. Feudal antiquity holds life by a precarious tenure amidst the revolutionary tendencies of this modern world. It has gone hard with the aristocracies throughout Europe of late years, though the French Emperor, as the head of the Reaction, may create a mock nobility round his upstart throne. The Roman aristocracy was an aristocracy of arms and law. The feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages was an aristocracy of arms and in some measure of law; it served the cause of political progress in its hour and after its kind; it confronted tyrannical kings when the people were as yet too weak to confront them; it conquered at Runnymede, as well as at Hastings. But the aristocracies of modern Europe are aristocracies neither of arms nor of law. They are aristocracies of social and political privilege alone. They owe, and are half conscious that they owe, their present existence only to factitious weaknesses of human nature, and to the antiquated terrors of communities long kept in leading-strings and afraid to walk alone. If there were nothing but reason to dispel them, these fears might long retain their sway over European society. But the example of a great commonwealth flourishing here without a privileged class, and of a popular sovereignty combining order with progress, tends, however remotely, to break the spell. Therefore, as a class, the English nobility cannot desire the success of your Republic. Some of the order there are who have hearts above their coronets, as there are some kings who have hearts above their crowns, and who in this great crisis of humanity forget that they are noblemen, and remember that they are men. But the order, as a whole, has been against you, and has swayed in the same direction all who were closely connected with it or dependent on it. It could not fail to be against you, if it was for itself. Be charitable to the instinct of self-preservation. It is strong, sometimes violent, in us all.
In truth, it is rather against the Liberals of England than against you that the feeling of our aristocracy is directed. Liberal leaders have made your name odious by pointing to your institutions as the condemnation of our own. They did this too indiscriminately perhaps, while in one respect your institutions were far below our own, inasmuch as you were a slaveholding nation. "Look," they were always saying, "at the Model Republic,—behold its unbroken prosperity, the harmony of its people under the system of universal suffrage, the lightness of its taxation,—behold, above all, its immunity from war!" All this is now turned upon us as a taunt; but the taunt implies rather a sense of escape on the part of those who utter it than malignity, and the answer to it is victory.
What has been said of our territorial aristocracy may be said of our commercial aristocracy, which is fast blending with the territorial into a government of wealth. This again is nothing new. History can point to more cases than one in which the sympathies of rich men have been regulated by their riches. The Money Power has been cold to your cause throughout Europe,—perhaps even here. In all countries great capitalists are apt to desire that the laborer should be docile and contented, that popular education should not be carried dangerously high, that the right relations between capital and labor should be maintained. The bold doctrines of the slave-owner as to "free labor and free schools" may not be accepted in their full strength; yet they touch a secret chord. But we have friends of the better cause among our English capitalists as well as among our English peers. The names of Mr. Baring and Mr. Thomas Bayley Potter are not unknown here. The course taken by such men at this crisis is an earnest of the essential unity of interest which underlies all class-divisions,—which, in our onward progress toward the attainment of a real community, will survive all class-distinctions, and terminate the conflict between capital and labor, not by making the laborer the slave of the capitalist, nor the capitalist the slave of the laborer, but by establishing between them mutual good-will, founded on intelligence and justice.
And let the upper classes of England have their due. The Lancashire operatives have been upon the other side; yet not the less have they received ready and generous help in their distress from all ranks and orders in the land.
It would be most unworthy of a student of history to preach vulgar hatred of an historic aristocracy. The aristocracy of England has been great in its hour, probably beneficent, perhaps indispensable to the progress of our nation, and so to the foundation of yours. Do you wish for your revenge upon it? The road to that revenge is sure. Succeed in your great experiment. Show by your example, by your moderation and self-control through this war and after its close, that it is possible for communities, duly educated, to govern themselves without the control of an hereditary order. The progress of opinion in England will in time do the rest. War, forced by you upon the English nation, would only strengthen the worst part of the English aristocracy in the worst way, by bringing our people into collision with a Democracy, and by giving the ascendancy, as all wars not carried on for a distinct moral object do, to military passions over political aspirations. Our war with the French Republic threw back our internal reforms, which till then had been advancing, for a whole generation. Even the pockets of our land-owners would not suffer, but gain, by the war; for their rents would be raised by the exclusion of your corn, and the price of labor would be lowered by the stoppage of emigration. The suffering would fall, as usual, on the people.
The gradual effect of your example may enable European society finally to emerge from feudalism, in a peaceful way, without violent revolutions. Every one who has studied history must regard violent revolutions with abhorrence. A European Liberal ought to be less inclined to them than ever, when he has seen America, and received from the sight, as I think he may, a complete assurance of the future.
I have spoken of our commercial aristocracy generally. Liverpool demands word by itself. It is the stronghold of the Southern party in England: from it hostile acts have proceeded, while from other quarters there have proceeded only hostile words. There are in Liverpool men who do honor to the name of British merchant; but the city as a whole is not the one among all our commercial cities in which moral chivalry is most likely to be found. In Manchester, cotton-spinning though it be, there is much that is great,—a love of Art, displayed in public exhibitions,—a keen interest in great political and social questions,—literature,—even religious thought,—something of that high aspiring spirit which made commerce noble in the old English merchant, in the Venetian and the Florentine. In Liverpool trade reigns supreme, and its behests, whatever they may be, are pretty sure to be eagerly obeyed. And the source of this is to be found, perhaps, partly in the fact that Liverpool is an old centre of the Slavery interest in England, one of the cities which have been built with the blood of the slave. As the great cotton port, it is closely connected with the planters by trade,—perhaps also by many personal ties and associations. It is not so much an English city as an offset and outpost of the South, and a counterpart to the offsets and outposts of the South in some of your great commercial cities here. No doubt, the shame of Liverpool Alabamas falls on England. England must own that she has produced merchants who disgrace their calling, contaminated by intercourse with the slave-owner, regardless of the honor and interest of their country, ready to plunge two kindred nations into a desolating war, if they can only secure the profits of their own trade. England must own that she has produced such men; but does this disgrace attach to her alone?
The clergy of the State Church, like the aristocracy, have probably been as a body against you in this struggle. In their case too, not hatred of America, but the love of their own institution, is the cause. If you are a standing menace to aristocracies, you are equally a standing menace to State Churches. A State Church rests upon the assumption that religion would fall, if it were not supported by the State. On this ground it is that the European nations endure the startling anomalies of their State Churches,—the interference of irreligious politicians in religion, the worldliness of ambitious ecclesiastics, the denial of liberty of conscience, the denial of truth. Therefore it is that they will see the canker of doubt slowly eating into faith beneath the outward uniformity of a political Church, rather than risk a change, which, as they are taught to believe, would bring faith to a sudden end. But the success of the voluntary system here is overthrowing this assumption. Shall I believe that Christianity deprived of State support must fall, when I see it without State support not only standing, but advancing with the settler into the remotest West? Will the laity of Europe long remain under their illusion in face of this great fact? Already the State Churches of Europe are placed in imminent peril by the controversies which, since religious life has reawakened among us, rend them from within, and by their manifest inability to satisfy the craving of society for new assurance of its faith. I cannot much blame the High-Church bishop who goes to Lord Palmerston to ask for intervention in company with Lord Clanricarde and Mr. Spence. You express surprise that the son of Wilberforce is not with you; but Wilberforce was not, like his son, a bishop of the State Church. Never in the whole course of history has the old order of things yielded without a murmur to the new. You share the fate of all innovators: your innovations are not received with favor by the powers which they threaten ultimately to sweep away.
To come from our aristocracy and landed gentry to our middle class. We subdivide the middle class into upper and lower. The upper middle class, comprising the wealthier tradesmen, forms a sort of minor aristocracy in itself, with a good deal of aristocratic feeling towards those beneath it. It is not well educated, for it will not go to the common schools, and it has few good private schools of its own; consequently, it does not think deeply on great political questions. It is at present very wealthy; and wealth, as you know, does not always produce high moral sentiment. It is not above a desire to be on the genteel side. It is not free from the worship of Aristocracy. That worship is rooted in the lower part of our common nature. Is fibres extend beyond the soil of England, beyond the soil of Europe. America has been much belied, if she is entirely free from this evil, if there are not here also men careful of class-distinctions, of a place in fashionable society, of factitious rank which parodies the aristocracy of the Old World. There is in the Anglo-Saxon character a strange mixture of independence and servility. In that long course of concessions by which your politicians strove—happily for the world and for yourselves they strove in vain—to conciliate the slave owning aristocracy of the South, did not something of social servility mingle with political fear?