British Legation

“ Thus was an extensive tract of country, bountifully endowed with natural gifts, and producing the necessaries and luxuries of life, including spices, metals, and precious stones, added to the British dominions; a numerous race of human beings, of a peculiarly interesting character, was delivered from the power of despotism, and brought under the advantages of the just government and equitable laws of Great Britain. ”

“ A body of barbarian mercenaries has appeared upon the European scene as an integral part of the British army, while the reflex influence of Indian Empire upon the political character and tendencies of the imperial nation is too manifest to be any longer overlooked. England now stands where the paths divide, the one leading by industrial and commercial progress to increase of political liberty; the other, by a career of conquest, to the political results in which such a career has never yet failed to end. ”

“ Can 8,000,000 of British men, thus outnumbered by foes, take upon their shoulders the expense of an expedition to enslave you? Will Great Britain, a wise and magnanimous country, thus tutored by experience and wasted by war, the French Navy riding her Channel, send an army to Ireland, to levy no tax, to enforce no law, to answer no end whatsoever, except to spoliate the charters of Ireland and enforce a barren oppression? ”

“ We see daily the accounts published of the treatment of our own and the subjects of other Asiatic nations by sections of our colonial empire, As this was the cause of the downfall of Greece, it maybe the beginning of the downfall of our empire. Should the pernicious doctrines and theoretical fads of a large and increasing body of members of the British Empire succeed, legislation may be carried by them in the parliament of Great Britain, and the overthrow of our vast empire may follow. As the barbarians from without overthrew Rome, the barbarians from within may do the same for Great Britain. ”

“ But what would become of the British workshops, and how would the British people endure such suffering as never yet befell them? Even with our Southern Rebellion on our hands, and English men-of-war on our coast, we could still, with our merchant marine, bring John Bull to his face. And John Bull knows it.
England is now building, in the cause of slavery and for the South, a great fleet of iron-clad pirate vessels, which are intended to prey on our commerce. How long will it be before retaliation on England begins, and, when it begins, how will it end? ”

“ Not less interesting to us has been the marvellous growth of Britain’s empire in the last hundred years. Her colonies and possessions are found on every continent, and her flag floats on every sea. She is still “Mistress of the Sea,” and her navy carries British goods and manufactures to every land. Her commerce is great beyond comparison, and her language and civilization are finding a sure foothold in every nation. But better than all, England’s influence for truth, justice, and righteousness, is greater than ever. ”

“ To the Liberals it meant presumption, a love of show and of sounding titles, a readiness to annex to the right hand and the left, a proneness to intervene in foreign quarrels, "a policy of bluster," in short. But in the mouth of its exponents Imperialism meant a desire to knit more closely together Great Britain and her colonies; to treat the empire as a whole, and to govern it without any slavish subservience to the "parochial politics" of England; to make the British name respected by civilized and feared by barbarous neighbours. ”

“ Yet it is this temper which has given England her great place in the world and which has cemented the British Empire. It is to be found not in England alone, but wherever there is a strain of English blood or an acceptance of English institutions. You can find it in Australia, in Canada, in America; it infects Scotland, and impresses Wales. It is everywhere in our trenches to-day. It is not clannish, or even national, it is essentially the lonely temper of a man independent to the verge of melancholy. ”

“ The illogical absurdity of such concession by Great Britain, so persistent always against Slavery, and now for more than a generation the declared protectress of the African race, becomes doubly apparent, when it is considered that every Rebel ship built in England and invested with ocean belligerence carries with it the Law of Slavery, so that, by British concession, the ship becomes an extension of Slave territory and a floating Slave castle. ”

“ We all know that the German writers have preached the doctrine that the British Empire was as ramshackle a concern as that of Austria-Hungary; that it must fall to pieces at the first shock of war. To-day the British Empire stands before the world linked together, literally, by a bond of steel. ”

“ As to this I answer, that those companies have a sum of ten thousand pounds sterling annually, from the Crown of Britain, for maintaining and upholding the forts and castles that are built upon the British Colonies, which with the duties arising from the Trade will be sufficient to maintain, uphold, and defend them with strength superior to the strongest enemy. ”

“ We hold it as one of the most glorious privileges which England possesses that a slave once setting foot on British soil or reaching the deck of a British man-of-war is a slave no longer, and must not be delivered up to the man who calls himself his owner while an English soldier or sailor remains alive to defend him, or a plank of the ship in which he has sought refuge still floats above the surface. ”

“ If the colonies, in truth, are to be made, or to be kept British, in anything else than in name—if even in name they can long be kept so—it must be by the infusion of the essential elements of British character and British principle into them, by means of British legislation. ”

“ British statesmen have been awakened to the necessity of winning the good-will of their colonists, and within recent years have adopted the policy of inviting the Colonial premiers to London to discuss questions affecting Imperial and Colonial interests. ”

“ British Colonies, and totally deprive the French of their most valuable Settlements in North-America.
For these Purposes only is the Formidable Army under my Command intended.
The King of Great-Britain wages no War with the Industrious Peasant, the sacred Orders of Religion, or the defenceless Women and Children: To these in their distressful Circumstances His Royal Clemency offers Protection. The People may remain unmolested on their Lands, inhabit their Houses, and enjoy their Religion in Security. ”

“ As loyal subjects of the great British Empire, we earnestly protest against its threatened disintegration, and call on our fellow-subjects in England, Scotland, and Wales to join us in resisting a measure that must inevitably and irrevocably effect the dismemberment of the Empire, and the consequent ruin of our position and influence among the nations. ”

“ Although smarting under the lash of ministerial aggressions upon their rights, the colonists, prompted by the pride of political and social birth-right, as children of Great Britain, maintained a loyal spirit, and a separation from the British empire was a proposition too startling to be readily embraced, or even favorably received by the great mass of the people, who regarded "Old England" with filial reverence. ”

“ In conversation with many of them afterwards it was interesting to hear the sons of settlers referring to the England that they had never seen, as "home." That night I realized as never before,—not even amid the agony and sacrifice of the Somme or the Ancre in France,—one reason why the British Empire is great and why, despite all muddling, it carries on. It lies in the feeling of imperial kinship far out at the frontiers of civilization. The colonial is in many respects a more devoted loyalist than the man at home. ”

“ It is not difficult to conceive circumstances in which the destruction of some of our main industries, occurring, perhaps, in the midst of a great war, might make it utterly impossible for our present population to live upon British soil, and when the possession of vast territories under the British flag, and in the hands of the British race, might become a matter of transcendent importance. ”

“ VI. "That all supplies to the crown being free gifts of the people, it is unreasonable and inconsistent with the principles and spirit of the British constitution, for the people of Great-Britain to grant to his Majesty the property of the colonies." ”

“ A persistency in adhering to laws or institutions that are associated with certain phases of English conquest, but which time and the march of ideas prove not only to be no longer suited to societary wants, but a positive evil in a progressive age, has been the source of not a few calamities to the cause of the British empire, involving the prestige and name of England in more than one defeat and disgrace. ”

“ For my part, I regard Great-Britain as a bulwark happily fixed between these colonies and the powerful nations of Europe. That kingdom is our advanced post or fortification, which remaining safe, we under its protection enjoying peace, may diffuse the blessings of religion, science, and liberty, thro' remote wildernesses. It is, therefore, incontestibly our duty and our interest, to support the strength of Great Britain. When, confiding in that strength, she begins to forget from whence it arose, it will be an easy thing to shew the source. ”

“ Can we dissociate ourselves from the glories and the traditions of the Empire? British Citizenship is no idle word, and what could we create for ourselves to surpass it? For a century the affectionate Colonial eye has rested from afar upon the British Throne, as the centre of power, protection and glory. Can all this trustfulness, this affection and loyalty be torn ruthlessly away? ”

“ Resolved,⁠That these ^united Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the british crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved
NH.—— ”

“ Anyone who knows English colonies knows that the British Government, wherever it has been possible to do so politically, that is, in all her colonies which are already properly organised and firmly established as British, has always met in a most generous and sympathetic way German, and indeed any foreign, trade or other enterprises. ”

“ The British remain a transitory garrison of military and civil administrative aliens, in the midst of vast populations, rooted in the traditions, religious beliefs and observances of untold centuries, during which they have carried on the same mode of life, and who seem neither to seek or to desire change. ”

“ Therefore it is so interesting to watch this gradual expansion of the national idea of empire based entirely, instinctively, and rightly on the colonies we were founding. The whole “earth hunger” of Great Britain, if viewed in its natural light, is the opening of new lands for trade, the extension of colonial empire by true colonists, men who mean to make the new realm their permanent home, and the preserving intact, with a good series of supply stations along these unmarked ways, the roads that unite Great Britain with her colonial children. ”

“ The lands called the British Empire belong to many races, and it is only by the sword and not by the Book of Peace or any pact of peace that those races can be kept from the ownership of their own countries. ”

“ The Anglo-Boer War is attributed to base motives on the part of the British Government, operating in collusion with capitalism—to England's passion for annexation, her rapacious greed for the Transvaal gold, her inordinate ambition to universal commercial supremacy, etc. ”

“ England, with a growing commerce in the Levant, and with a prodigious empire nearer to the rising sun, could not permit the one to be absorbed and the other to be threatened by a most aggressive and ambitious state. ”

“ The very enormity of the military force by which Europe at present is held in slavery, is but a confession of the consciousness that the principles of the British wealth are now become the principles of all peoples ”

“ To be sure, in a body so numerous and all but ramified throughout every portion of the habitable globe, there have been some unworthy members, who fell before the love of gain, or British gold; but, then, and with pride we say it, taking the gigantic proportions of the organization into consideration, and the temptations to sin which have been so constantly placed before it by that blood-thirsty assassin, England, it stands, by comparison, pre-eminently pure above any other similar revolutionary body that has ever obtained in either hemisphere, or in any age of the world. ”

“ Before the revolution, all the colonies constituted a part of the dominions of the king of Great Britain, and all the colonists were natural born subjects, entitled to all the privileges of British born subjects, and capable of inheriting lands in any part of the British dominions, as owing a common allegiance to the British crown. ”

“ England, having then engrossed the whole wealth of the colonial world; England, having lost nothing of its original possessions; England then comes forward, proposing general peace, and offering—what? offering the surrender of all that it had acquired, in order to obtain—what? not the dismemberment, not the partition of ancient France, but the return of a part of those conquests, no one of which could be retained but in direct contradiction to that original and solemn pledge which is now referred to as the proof of the just and moderate disposition of the French Republic. ”