e proud to learn the English tongue, and who find in
our land, as they think, the great asylum of the free. Let England and
America quarrel. Let your weight be cast into the scale against us, when
we struggle with the great conspiracy of absolutist powers around us,
and the hope of freedom in Europe would be almost quenched. Hampden and
Washington in arms against each other! What could the Powers of Evil
desire more? When Americans talk lightly of a war with England, one
desires to ask them what they believe the effects of such a war would be
on their own country. How many more American wives do they wish to make
widows? How many more American children do they wish to make orphans? Do
they deem it wise to put a still greater strain on the already groaning
timbers of the Constitution? Do they think that the suspension of trade
and emigration, with the price of labor rising and the harvests of
Illinois excluded from their market, would help you to cope with the
financial difficulties which fill with anxiety every reflecting mind? Do
they think that four more years of war-government would render easy the
tremendous work of reconstruction? But the interests of the great
community of nations are above the private interests of America or of
England. If war were to break out between us, what would become of
Italy, abandoned without help to her Austrian enemy and her sinister
protector? What would become of the last hopes of liberty in France?
What would become of the world?

English liberties, imperfect as they may be,--and as an English Liberal
of course thinks they are,--are the source from which your liberties
have flowed, though the river may be more abundant than the spring.
Being in America, I am in England,--not only because American
hospitality makes me feel that I am still in my own country, but because
our institutions are fundamentally the same. The great foundations of
constitutional government, legislative assemblies, parliamentary
representation, personal liberty, self-taxation, the freedom of the
press, allegiance to the law as a power above individual will,--all
these were established, not without memorable efforts and memorable
sufferings, in the land from which the fathers of your republic came.
You are living under the Great Charter, the Petition of Eight, the
Habeas Corpus Act, the Libel Act. Perhaps you have not even yet taken
from us all that, if a kindly feeling continues between us, you may find
it desi