ing played under
the cross of St. George in Boston, New-York, and Philadelphia, she might
have heard the music of Yankee Doodle, Hail Columbia, and the
Star-Spangled Banner on the heights of Quebec, reechoed in fraternal
chorus over the Union intended by God, under one government, of the
valley of the lakes and the St. Lawrence. Looking nearer home, she might
have beheld that banner, whose stars she would have extinguished in
blood, floating triumphantly, in union with the Shamrock, over that
glorious Emerald Isle, whose generous heart beats with love of the
American Union, and whose blood, now as ever heretofore, is poured out
in copious libations in its defense. Indeed, but for the forbearance of
our Government, and the judgment and good sense of Lord Lyons, the
conflict was inevitable.

The hope was expressed by me in England that 'those glorious isles would
become the breakwater of liberty, against which the surges of European
despotism would dash in vain.' This was her true policy, justice to
Ireland, successive reforms in her system, a further wise extension of
the suffrage, with the vote by ballot, a cordial moral alliance with her
kindred race in America, and a full participation, mutually beneficial,
in our ever enlarging commerce. But her oligarchy has chosen coalition
with the South and slavery, and war upon our Union and the republican
principle. _Divide and conquer_ is their motto, SUICIDE will be their
epitaph.

England is now playing her part in the fourth act of the drama of
slavery. During the first act, for more than a century, she was actively
engaged in the African slave-trade, and in forcing the victims, as
slaves, upon the colonies, against their protest.

With the close of the first act came the American Revolution, when, in
the truthful language of Mr. Jefferson, before quoted, England 'excited
the slaves to rise in arms among us, and to purchase the liberty of
which she had deprived them, by murdering the people on whom she had
obtruded them.'

The third act, from 1834 to 1861, presented England engaged in fierce
denunciations of American slavery. The British pulpit, press, and
hustings, her universities, literature, courts, bar, statesmen, and
orators, were all devoted to assaults on American slavery, and upon our
Constitution, for tolerating the system, even for a moment. Her
Parliament most graciously favored us with one of its own members, to
denounce in the _North_, the slavery of the