This rebellion came just in the right time for us. In a few years more of your success, we should have been compelled to establish free schools, give the vote by ballot, and extend the suffrage, until the people should rule here, as with you. But now that your rebellion has proved the failure of republics, we shall yield no more. Slavery, in dissolving your Union, has accomplished all this for us, and therefore must be a good institution. Some one has sent me one Edmund Kirke's anti-slavery novel, entitled, 'Among the Pines.' Your people seem to have gone crazy over it; but it will have no readers here. Is this Kirke a Scotchman? I had a tenant called Kirke, who was evicted for avowing republican opinions. Can this be the same man? I told the Confederate minister, Mr. Mason, that if some Southron would write a good novel in favor of slavery, it would have a great circulation here; and he said he would name this in his next despatch to his Government. He has a fine aristocratic air, and could scarcely be descended from the women (imported and sold as wives for a few pounds of tobacco to the Virginians) who were the mothers of the F. F. V.'s. But Mr. M. says slavery will soon build up a splendid nobility in the South.
Jefferson Davis is very popular here, and was lately cheered in Exeter Hall; but Yancey and Wigfall are idolized. Our great favorite in the North is Ex-President Buchanan. When did the head of a Government ever before have the courage to aid a rebellion against it, so gracefully yielding it the national forts, ships, mints, guns, and arsenals? But what we most admire is his message, in which he proved you have no right to coerce the South or suppress rebellion. This was a splendid discovery for us, as it demonstrated how superior our Government is to yours. If Mr. Buchanan would come here, we would raise him to the peerage, and, in commemoration of his two great acts, would give him the double title of the Duke of Lecompton and Disunion. Floyd, Cobb, and Thompson should each be earls. Thompson should be called Earl Arnold, in gratitude for the services to us of the celebrated Benedict Arnold.
I told Mr. M. how much we had condemned his fugitive slave law; but he convinced me that it was a most humane and excellent measure. Fugitives from the kindest masters, and ungrateful for all the blessings of slavery, why should they not be brought back in chains? He reminded me of Generals Shields, Corcoran, and Meagher, Irishmen commanding Irish troops for the North, and said they should be brought back to Ireland and hung on Emmet's scaffold. You know we keep that scaffold still standing, as a terror to Irish rebels, although we admire so much rebellion in America. Mr. M. spoke also of Sigel, Heintzelman, Rosecrans, Asboth, and expressed his surprise that the Bourbon princes would fight side by side with the mudsills of the North.
In a few years, Mr. M. said, the South would establish a monarchy, and that a son of the Queen should marry a daughter of Jefferson Davis, and thus unite the two dynasties by kindred ties. It was his opinion that the South would limit the right of suffrage to slaveholders, numbering about two hundred thousand; that they would have a house of peers, lords temporal and spiritual, composed (including bishops) of all who held over five hundred slaves; but that their Archbishop of Cantingbury should own at least one thousand. He thought the number requisite for the peerage would be enlarged after the reopening of the African slave trade, which would soon furnish England cheap cotton. His remarks on this subject reminded me how large a portion of my fortune was accumulated, during the last century, by the profits of the African slave trade. Mr. M. told me the King of Dahomey would furnish the South one hundred thousand slaves a year, for twenty dollars each, and that England should have the profits of the trade as before, and Liverpool again be the great slave port. He alluded to the Continental Monthly, which he said was an abolition journal, and denounced Kirke, Kimball, Leland, Henry, Greeley, Stanton, and Walker. He was specially severe on Walker and Stanton, charging them with the defeat of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, and the consequent accession of Kansas and all the Territories to the free States, He said Walker and Stanton had no right to reject the Oxford and McGee returns, although they were forged. And now, dear Mrs. Stowe, if you would only change, as we all have here, and write, as you only can, a great novel to prove the beauties of slavery, its circulation here would be enormous, and we would make you a duchess. Adieu until my next.
P.S.—I have invested all my United States stock in Confederate bonds.
The style of the foregoing letter would point to the Duchess of Sutherland as the author, but such a change would be miraculous. Was the copy of the letter found in an intercepted despatch from Mr. Mason to Jefferson Davis?
FOOTNOTES
[A] Lucan, Pharsalia.
[B] The Lotus was to the Egyptian and Hindu not only an image of physical life, but of life in all its strength and splendor, the type of the generating and forming force of Nature in itself, expressing the idea of 'water, health, life.' The Hindu imagined in its form the whole earth, swimming like the lotus on water; the pistils represent Mount Meru (the world's central point and the Indian Olympus), the stamens are the peaks of the surrounding mountains, the four central leaves of its crown are the four great divisions of the earth, according to the four points of the compass, while the other leaves represented the circles of the earth surrounding India. On the lotus is throned Brahma the creator, and Lakshmi, the goddess of all blessings.