the other in a bad and odious cause. For while, on the American side,
the war would have been one of reckless persistency in wrong, on ours
it would have been a war in alliance with, and, to practical purposes,
in defence and propagation of, slavery. We had, indeed, been wronged.
We had suffered an indignity, and something more than an indignity,
which, not to have resented, would have been to invite a constant
succession of insults and injuries from the same and from every other
quarter. We could have acted no otherwise than we have done: yet it is
impossible to think, without something like a shudder, from what we
have escaped. We, the emancipators of the slave--who have wearied
every Court and Government in Europe and America with our protests and
remonstrances, until we goaded them into at least ostensibly
coöperating with us to prevent the enslaving of the negro--we, who for
the last half century have spent annual sums, equal to the revenue of
a small kingdom, in blockading the African coast, for a cause in which
we not only had no interest, but which was contrary to our pecuniary
interest, and which many believed would ruin, as many among us still,
though erroneously, believe that it has ruined, our colonies,--_we_
should have lent a hand to setting up, in one of the most commanding
positions of the world, a powerful republic, devoted not only to
slavery, but to pro-slavery propagandism--should have helped to give a
place in the community of nations to a conspiracy of slave-owners, who
have broken their connection with the American Federation on the sole
ground, ostentatiously proclaimed, that they thought an attempt would
be made to restrain, not slavery itself, but their purpose of
spreading slavery wherever migration or force could carry it.

A nation which has made the professions that England has, does not
with impunity, under however great provocation, betake itself to
frustrating the objects for which it has been calling on the rest of