t to defend its life is the claim of
everything that lives, and we must not lose our temper because the
representatives of an hereditary ruling class wish to preserve those
privileges which are their very existence, nor because they have
foresight enough to know, that, if the Western Continent remains the
seat of a vast, thriving, irresistible, united republic, the days of
their life, as an order, are numbered.

"The _people_," as Mr. Motley has said, in one of his official letters,
"everywhere sympathize with us; for they know that our cause is that of
free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against an
oligarchy." We have evidence that this is partially true of the British
people. But we know also how much they are influenced by their political
and social superiors, and we know, too, what base influences have been
long at work to corrupt their judgment and inflame their prejudices. We
have too often had occasion to see that the middle classes had been
reached by the passions of their superiors, or infected by the poison
instilled by traitorous emissaries. We have been struck with this
particularly in some of the British colonies. It is the livid gleam of a
reflected hatred they shed upon us; but the angle of reflection is equal
to the angle of incidence, and we feel sure that the British inhabitants
of an African cape or of a West-India islet would not have presumed to
sympathize with the Rebels, unless they had known that it was
respectable, if not fashionable, to do so at home. It is one of the most
painful illustrations of the influence of a privileged class that the
opinions and prejudices and interests of the English aristocracy should
have been so successfully imposed upon a large portion of the people,
for whom the North was fighting over again the battles of that long
campaign which will never end until the rightful Sovereigns have
dispossessed the whole race of Pretenders.

The effect of this course on the part of the mother-country has been
like that of harsh treatment upon children generally. It chills their
affections, lessens their respect for the parental authority, interrupts
their friendly intercourse, and perhaps drives them from the
family-mansion. But it cannot destroy the ties of blood and the
recollections of the past. It cannot deprive the "old home" of its
charm. If there has been but a single member of the family beneath its
roof who has remained faithful and kind, all grate