in and character of the rebellion. To every disinterested observer,
it is evident that the South is wrong in every way. It needs not a
Montesquieu to understand that a party not menaced in the least, which,
through ambition or pride, tears its country to pieces and destroys its
national unity, has no right to the sympathies of the French. As to
declaring slavery sacred, that is a work which must be left to the
preachers of the South. All the ingenuity in the world cannot lift up
this fallen cause. Had the confederates a thousand reasons for complaint
and for revolt, there would always rest on their rebellion an indelible
stain. No Christian, no liberal person will ever interest himself for
men who, in this nineteenth century, insolently proclaim their desire to
perpetuate and extend slavery. Though it is still permitted to the
planters to listen to theories that have infatuated and lost them, such
sophistries will never cross the ocean.

The advocates of the South have done it a fatal service; they have made
it believe that Europe, enlightened or seduced, would range itself on
its side and finally throw into the balance something more than empty
promises. This delusion has and still maintains the resistance of the
South, it prolongs the war, and with it our sufferings. If, as the North
had a right to expect, the friends of liberty had, from the first,
boldly pronounced against the policy of slavery, if the advocates of
peace upon the seas, if the defenders of the rights of neutrals had
spoken in favor of the Union and rejected a separation, which could only
profit England, it is probable that the South would have been less
anxious to start on a journey without visible end. If, in spite of the
courage and devotion of its soldiers; if, in spite of the ability of its
generals, the South fails in an enterprise which, in my opinion, cannot
be too much blamed, let it lay the fault on those who have so poor an
opinion of Europe as to imagine that they will subject _its_ opinion to
a policy against which patriotism protests, and which the gospel and
humanity condemn.

We will grant, they may say, that the South is altogether wrong;
nevertheless it wishes to separate, it can no longer live with the
people of the North. The war alone, whatever may be its origin, is a new
cause of disunion. By what right can twenty millions of men force ten
millions (of those ten millions there are four millions of slaves whose
will is not consul