islation, any concessions or compromises of ideal or
abstract right?

But we must come to our specifications, introducing them with but a
single other needful suggestion. We have not to complain of any acts or
formal measures of the English Government against us,--nor even of the
omission of any possible public manifestation which might have turned
to our encouragement or service. But it will be admitted that we have
grievances to complain of, if the tone and the strain of English opinion
and sentiment have been such as to inspirit the South and to dispirit
the North. If English comments have palliated or justified the original
and the incidental measures of the Rebellion,--if they have been zealous
to find or to exaggerate excuses for it, to overstate the apparent or
professed grounds of it, to wink at the meannesses and outrages by which
it has thriven,--if they have perverted or misrepresented the real
issue, have ridiculed or discouraged the purposes of its patriotic
opponents, have embarrassed or impeded their hopes of success, or have
prejudged or foreclosed the probable result,--it will be admitted, we
say, that we have grievances against those who have so dealt by us in
the hour of our dismay and trial. And it is an enormous aggravation of
the disappointment or the wrong which we are bearing, that it is visited
upon us by England just as we have initiated measures for at least
restraining and abating the dominant power of that evil institution for
our complicity in the support of which she has long been our unsparing
censor. We complain generally of the unsympathizing and contemptuous
tone of England towards us,--of the mercurial standard by which she
judges our strife,--of the scarcely qualified delight with which she
parades our occasional ill-successes and discomfitures,--of the baste
which she has made to find tokens of a rising despotism or a military
dictatorship in those measures of our Government which are needful
and consistent with the exigencies of a state of warfare, such as the
suspension, on occasions, of the _habeas corpus_, the suppression of
disloyal publications, the employment of spies, and the requisition of
passports,--and finally, of the contemptible service to which England
has tried to put our last tariff, and of her evident unwillingness to
have us find or furnish the finances of our war. Not to deal, however,
with generalities, we proceed to make three distinct points of an
argument tha