ho in this great crisis of humanity
forget that they are noblemen, and remember that they are men. But the
order, as a whole, has been against you, and has swayed in the same
direction all who were closely connected with it or dependent on it. It
could not fail to be against you, if it was for itself. Be charitable to
the instinct of self-preservation. It is strong, sometimes violent, in
us all.

In truth, it is rather against the Liberals of England than against you
that the feeling of our aristocracy is directed. Liberal leaders have
made your name odious by pointing to your institutions as the
condemnation of our own. They did this too indiscriminately perhaps,
while in one respect your institutions were far below our own, inasmuch
as you were a slaveholding nation. "Look," they were always saying, "at
the Model Republic,--behold its unbroken prosperity, the harmony of its
people under the system of universal suffrage, the lightness of its
taxation,--behold, above all, its immunity from war!" All this is now
turned upon us as a taunt; but the taunt implies rather a sense of
escape on the part of those who utter it than malignity, and the answer
to it is victory.

What has been said of our territorial aristocracy may be said of our
commercial aristocracy, which is fast blending with the territorial into
a government of wealth. This again is nothing new. History can point to
more cases than one in which the sympathies of rich men have been
regulated by their riches. The Money Power has been cold to your cause
throughout Europe,--perhaps even here. In all countries great
capitalists are apt to desire that the laborer should be docile and
contented, that popular education should not be carried dangerously
high, that the right relations between capital and labor should be
maintained. The bold doctrines of the slave-owner as to "free labor and
free schools" may not be accepted in their full strength; yet they touch
a secret chord. But we have friends of the better cause among our
English capitalists as well as among our English peers. The names of Mr.
Baring and Mr. Thomas Bayley Potter are not unknown here. The course
taken by such men at this crisis is an earnest of the essential unity of
interest which underlies all class-divisions,--which, in our onward
progress toward the attainment of a real community, will survive all
class-distinctions, and terminate the conflict between capital and
labor, not by making the labor