expressed concerning the incidents and probable eventualities of the
struggle--the bitter and irritating criticism which has been kept up,
not even against both parties equally, but almost solely against the
party in the right, and the ungenerous refusal of all those just
allowances which no country needs more than our own, whenever its
circumstances are as near to those of America as a cut finger is to an
almost mortal wound,--these facts, with minds not favorably disposed
to us, would have gone far to make the most odious interpretation of
the war in which we have been so nearly engaged with the United
States, appear by many degrees the most probable. There is no denying
that our attitude towards the contending parties (I mean our moral
attitude, for politically there was no other course open to us than
neutrality) has not been that which becomes a people who are as
sincere enemies of slavery as the English really are, and have made as
great sacrifices to put an end to it where they could. And it has been
an additional misfortune that some of our most powerful journals have
been for many years past very unfavorable exponents of English feeling
on all subjects connected with slavery: some, probably, from the
influences, more or less direct, of West Indian opinions and
interests: others from inbred Toryism, which, even when compelled by
reason to hold opinions favorable to liberty, is always adverse to it
in feeling; which likes the spectacle of irresponsible power exercised
by one person over others; which has no moral repugnance to the
thought of human beings born to the penal servitude for life, to which
for the term of a few years we sentence our most hardened criminals,
but keeps its indignation to be expended on "rabid and fanatical
abolitionists" across the Atlantic, and on those writers in England
who attach a sufficiently serious meaning to their Christian
professions, to consider a fight against slavery as a fight for God.