Now, when the mind of England, and it may almost be said, of the
civilized part of mankind, has been relieved from the incubus which
had weighed on it ever since the _Trent_ outrage, and when we are no
longer feeling towards the Northern Americans as men feel towards
those with whom they may be on the point of struggling for life or
death; now, if ever, is the time to review our position, and consider
whether we have been feeling what ought to have been felt, and wishing
what ought to have been wished, regarding the contest in which the
Northern States are engaged with the South.

In considering this matter, we ought to dismiss from our minds, as far
as possible, those feelings against the North, which have been
engendered not merely by the _Trent_ aggression, but by the previous
anti-British effusions of newspaper writers and stump orators. It is
hardly worth while to ask how far these explosions of ill-humor are
anything more than might have been anticipated from ill-disciplined
minds, disappointed of the sympathy which they justly thought they had
a right to expect from the great anti-slavery people, in their really
noble enterprise. It is almost superfluous to remark that a democratic
Government always shows worst where other Governments generally show
best, on its outside; that unreasonable people are much more noisy
than the reasonable; that the froth and scum are the part of a
violently fermenting liquid that meets the eyes, but are not its body
and substance. Without insisting on these things, I contend, that all
previous cause of offence should be considered as cancelled, by the
reparation which the American Government has so amply made; not so
much the reparation itself, which might have been so made as to leave
still greater cause of permanent resentment behind it; but the manner
and spirit in which they have made it. These have been such as most of
us, I venture to say, did not by any means expect. If reparation were