s a
portion of our high intellect; and a pretended passion for
prize-fighting shows that men of culture are weary of civilization, and
wish to go back to barbarism for a while. The present head of the
Government in England is not only the confederate, but the counterpart,
of the head of the French Empire; and the rule of each denotes the
temporary ascendancy of the same class of motives in their respective
nations. An English Liberal is tempted to despond, when he compares the
public life of England in the time of Pym and Hampden with our public
life now. But there is greatness still in the heart of the English
nation.

And you, too, have you not known in the course of your history a
slack-tide of faith, a less aspiring hour? Have not you, too, known a
temporary ascendancy of material over spiritual interests, a lowering of
the moral tone, a readiness, for the sake of ease and peace and secure
enjoyment, to compromise with evil? Have not you, too, felt the tyranny
of wealth, putting the higher motives for a moment under its feet? What
else has brought these calamities upon you? What else bowed your necks
to the yoke which you are now breaking at so great a cost? Often and
long in the life of every nation, though the tide is still advancing,
the wave recedes. Often and long the fears of man overcome his hopes;
but in the end the hopes of man overcome his fears. Your regeneration,
when it is achieved, will set forward the regeneration of the European
nations. It is the function which all nations, which all men, in their
wavering progress towards perfection, perform in turn for each other.

This temporary lowering of the moral tone in English society has
extended to the question of Slavery. It has deadened our feelings on
that subject, though I hope without shaking our principles. You ask
whether England can have been sincere in her enmity to Slavery, when she
refuses sympathy to you in your struggle with the Slave Power.
Talleyrand, cynic as he was, knew that she was sincere, though he said
that not a man in France thought so but himself. She redeemed her own
slaves with a great price. She sacrificed her West-Indian interest. She
counts that achievement higher than her victories. She spends annually
much money and many lives and risks much enmity in her crusade against
the slave-trade. When your Southern statesmen have tried to tamper with
her, they have found her true. If they had bid us choose between a
concession to