oisoned arrow aimed at her life? Where is
the little hunchback's journal, whose wit was the dog-vane of
fashionable opinion, once pointing towards freedom as the prevailing
wind seemed to blow, now veered round to obey the poisoned breath of
Slavery? All silent or hostile, subject as they are themselves to the
overmastering influence of a class which dreads the existence of a
self-governing state, like this majestic Union, worse than falsehood,
worse than shame, worse than robbery, worse than complicity with the
foulest of rebellions, worse than partnership in the gigantic scheme
which was to blacken half a hemisphere with the night of eternal
Slavery!

It is the miserable defection of so many of the thinking class, in this
time of the greatest popular struggle known to history, which impresses
us far more than the hostility of a few land-grasping nobles, or the
coldness of a Government mainly guided by their counsels. The natural
consequence has been the complete destruction of that undue deference to
foreign judgments which was so long a characteristic of our literature.
The current English talk about the affairs that now chiefly interest us
excites us very moderately. The leading organs of thought have lost
their hold upon the mind of most thinking people among us. We have
learned to distrust the responses of their timeserving oracles, and to
laugh at the ignorant pretensions of their literary artisans. These
"outsiders" have shown, to our entire satisfaction, that they are
thoroughly incompetent to judge our character as a community, and that
they have no true estimate of its spirit and its resources. The view
they have taken of the strife in which we have been and are engaged is
not only devoid of any high moral sympathy, but utterly shallow, and
flagrantly falsified by the whole course of events, political,
financial, and military.

Perhaps we ought not to be surprised or disappointed. With a congenital
difference of organization, with a new theory of human rights involving
a virtual reconstruction of society, with larger views of human destiny,
with a virgin continent for them to be worked out in, the American
should expect to be misunderstood by the civilizations of the past,
based on a quagmire of pauperism and ignorance, or overhung by an
avalanche of revolution. Other peoples, emerging from, a condition of
serfdom, retaining many of the instincts of a conquered race, get what
liberty they have by extorting