d any
friend of his country, or of mankind, object to this, if it promoted the
welfare of the people? We reject all force or intervention. Our only
influence is that of our example. If our system was a failure, the
institutions of England were not endangered, but strengthened by such a
result. It was their success only that made them dangerous, not to the
people of England, but to dynastic ambition, to aristocratic rule, and
to selfish interests. To insure our permanent division, was to destroy
us. Hence, she encouraged the South, acknowledged her as a belligerent,
welcomed the rebel flag and war vessels into her ports, protected them
there, enabled them to elude our cruisers, and prepared to aid and
sustain slavery. For a time, with the exception of Cobden and Bright, we
seemed to have had scarcely an influential friend in England. Her masses
favored us, but five sixths of them are excluded from the polls by
restricted suffrage. For a time, King Cotton never had more loyal
subjects, than those who then controlled the press and government of
England. Our Union was to be severed, the Southern confederacy
acknowledged, the blockade broken, free trade between the South and
England established, cotton given her, and refused us; we were to be
forever cut off from the gulf and the lower Mississippi; Portland (the
star of the East) was to become a British city, and Maine, always loyal
and patriotic, was to be wrested from us, and reannexed to the British
crown. It was the carnival of despots, exulting over our anticipated
ruin, in our death-struggle in the great cause of human liberty and
human progress.

And yet it was England that forced slavery upon the South against its
earnest protest, and colonial acts vetoed by the British crown. Then,
during our colonial weakness and dependence, the kings, and queens, and
parliaments of England, not only legalized and encouraged the African
slave-trade, but gave charters and monopolies for the wretched traffic.
Then the lords and noble ladies, the blood royal, the merchant-princes,
and even the mitred prelates of England, engaged most extensively in
this accursed commerce, and thousands of the rich and noble of England
enjoy now, by inheritance, fortunes thus accumulated. British vessels,
sailing from British ports, openly displayed there upon their decks the
shackles that were to bind the victims, thousands of whom, in the
horrors of the middle passage, found unshrouded in an ocean gr