“ The South and our Southern sympathisers are so delighted with the doings of the Alabama and with Earl Russell’s punctiliousness, that a fleet of 40 or 50 ships of war is said to be far advanced in English ports, and a Southern loan of three million sterling has been contracted in London to pay for them. ”

“ He builds wrong upon wrong. What had been an inhuman practice, while it was believed to be the strength of the Union, is suddenly patronized as a right of rebels, (who are not yet recognised as a nation,) as soon as it becomes a cruel danger to the innocent merchants of the Union, with whom we are in beneficial commerce! Will this lessen the opinion of the South, that we are a set of hypocritical Pharisees? ”

“ The agitation re-commenced; the Morning Star asserted and re-asserted that there had been such a dispatch; nevertheless, it was three weeks before Earl Russell was pleased to produce tranquillity by at last publishing it. Why was this? Was it [Pg 9] thought politic to keep up the public exasperation,—on the hypothesis of the Times, that the “mob” in America would overrule the President and force a war? or was some one in England trying to exasperate that “mob” and the mob of the English gentry too, in hope that the exasperation must, somehow or other, at last bring us into a war? ”

“ Nor did these same ministers even remonstrate, when the Emperor Nicolas lent 200,000 men to Austria in 1849, in order to crush the freedom of Hungary, after Hungary had won her victory over Austria. Lord Palmerston then volunteered to say in Parliament, that Hungary was a nation fighting for its rights. Those were actually treaty-rights. Hungary had a national history as old as England. It was a cause of freedom, of free religion, and of hereditary law. The mass of the nobility and the church were as warm in the cause as the meanest gipsy, peasant, and Jew. ”

“ No great power can afford to patronize official treasons in foreign governments. If the English government has no interest in republicanism, if it has become indifferent to freedom and slavery, it has interest in fidelity to official oaths. Earl Russell had a right, by International Law, without offending its minutest punctilio, to offer to Mr. ”

“ That you do not see it thus yourselves, does but show your excitement. The British government, a party in the cause, takes opinion of its own counsel on a case submitted by itself, and is proceeding to enforce their view of its own rights vi et armis, and without hearing the defendant. ”