sh merchant; but the city as a whole is not
the one among all our commercial cities in which moral chivalry is most
likely to be found. In Manchester, cotton-spinning though it be, there
is much that is great,--a love of Art, displayed in public
exhibitions,--a keen interest in great political and social
questions,--literature,--even religious thought,--something of that high
aspiring spirit which made commerce noble in the old English merchant,
in the Venetian and the Florentine. In Liverpool trade reigns supreme,
and its behests, whatever they may be, are pretty sure to be eagerly
obeyed. And the source of this is to be found, perhaps, partly in the
fact that Liverpool is an old centre of the Slavery interest in England,
one of the cities which have been built with the blood of the slave. As
the great cotton port, it is closely connected with the planters by
trade,--perhaps also by many personal ties and associations. It is not
so much an English city as an offset and outpost of the South, and a
counterpart to the offsets and outposts of the South in some of your
great commercial cities here. No doubt, the shame of Liverpool Alabamas
falls on England. England must own that she has produced merchants who
disgrace their calling, contaminated by intercourse with the
slave-owner, regardless of the honor and interest of their country,
ready to plunge two kindred nations into a desolating war, if they can
only secure the profits of their own trade. England must own that she
has produced such men; but does this disgrace attach to her alone?

The clergy of the State Church, like the aristocracy, have probably been
as a body against you in this struggle. In their case too, not hatred of
America, but the love of their own institution, is the cause. If you are
a standing menace to aristocracies, you are equally a standing menace to
State Churches. A State Church rests upon the assumption that religion
would fall, if it were not supported by the State. On this ground it is
that the European nations endure the startling anomalies of their State
Churches,--the interference of irreligious politicians in religion, the
worldliness of ambitious ecclesiastics, the denial of liberty of
conscience, the denial of truth. Therefore it is that they will see the
canker of doubt slowly eating into faith beneath the outward uniformity
of a political Church, rather than risk a change, which, as they are
taught to believe, would bring faith to a su