of America.

'I can understand,' said Madame de Tocqueville, 'the indignation of the
North against you. It is, of course, excessive, but they had a right to
expect you to be on their side in an anti-slavery war.'

'They had no right,' I said, 'to expect from our Government anything but
absolute neutrality.'

'But you need not,' she replied, 'have been so eager to put the South on
the footing of belligerents.'

'On what other footing,' I asked, 'could we put them? On what other
footing does the North put them? Have they ventured, or will they
venture, to hang a single seceder?'

'At least,' she said, 'you might have expressed more sympathy with the
North?'

'I think,' I answered, 'that we have expressed as much sympathy as it was
possible to feel. We deplore the combat, we hold the South responsible
for it, we think their capricious separation one of the most foolish and
one of the most wicked acts that have ever been committed; we hope that
the North will beat them, and we should bitterly regret their forcing
themselves back into the Union on terms making slavery worse, if
possible, than it is now. We wish the contest to end as quickly as
possible: but we do not think that it can end by the North subjugating
the Southerns and forcing them to be its subjects.

'The best termination to which we look forward as possible, is that the
North should beat the South, and then dictate its own terms of
separation.

'If they wish to go farther than this, if they wish us to love or to
admire our Northern cousins in their political capacity, they wish for
what is impossible.

'We cannot forget that the Abolitionists have been always a small and
discredited party; that the Cuba slave trade is mainly carried on from
New York; that they have neglected the obligations formally entered
into by them with us to co-operate in the suppression of the slave trade;
that they have pertinaciously refused to allow us even to inquire into
the right of slavers to use the American flag; that it is the capital of
the North which feeds the slavery of the South; that the first act of the
North, as soon as the secession of the South from Congress allowed it to
do what it liked, was to enact a selfish protective tariff; that their
treatment of us, from the time that they have felt strong enough to
insult us, has been one unvaried series of threats, bullying, and injury;
that they have refused to submit their claims on us to arbitration,
driven