ure in their course, and
permitted to take the relations between England and America as my
subject, I did not feel at liberty to decline the invitation. England is
my country. To America, though an alien by birth, I am, as an English
Liberal, no alien in heart. I deeply share the desire of all my
political friends in England and of the leaders of my party to banish
ill-feeling and promote good-will between the two kindred nations. My
heart would be cold, if that desire were not increased by the welcome
which I have met with here. More than once, when called upon to speak,
(a task little suited to my habits and powers,) I have tried to make it
understood that the feelings of England as a nation towards you in your
great struggle had not been truly represented by a portion of our press.
Some of my present hearers may, perhaps, have seen very imperfect
reports of those speeches. I hope to say what I have to say with a
little more clearness now.

There was between England and America the memory of ancient quarrels,
which your national pride did not suffer to sleep, and which sometimes
galled a haughty nation little patient of defeat. In more recent times
there had been a number of disputes, the more angry because they were
between brethren. There had been disputes about boundaries, in which
England believed herself to have been overreached by your negotiators,
or, what was still more irritating, to have been overborne because her
main power was not here. There had been disputes about the Right of
Search, in which we had to taste the bitterness, now not unknown to you,
of those whose sincerity in a good cause is doubted, when, in fact, they
are perfectly sincere. You had alarmed and exasperated us by your Ostend
manifesto and your scheme for the annexation of Cuba. In these
discussions some of your statesmen had shown towards us the spirit which
Slavery does not fail to engender in the domestic tyrant; while,
perhaps, some of our statesmen had been too ready to presume bad
intentions and anticipate wrong. In our war with Russia your sympathies
had been, as we supposed, strongly on the Russian side; and we--even
those among us who least approved the war--had been scandalized at
seeing the American Republic in the arms of a despotism which had just
crushed Hungary, and which stood avowed as the arch-enemy of liberty in
Europe. In the course of that war an English envoy committed a fault by
being privy to recruiting in your ter