the home-bred slave. I have heard Mr. Spence's book called
the most successful lie in history. Very successful it certainly was,
and its influence in misleading England ought not to be overlooked. It
was written with great skill, and it came out just at the right time,
before people had formed their opinions, and when they were glad to have
a theory presented to their minds. But its success would have been
short-lived, had it not received what seemed authoritative confirmation
from the language of statesmen here.

I might mention many other things which have influenced opinion in the
wrong way: the admiration felt by our people, and, to your honor,
equally felt by you, for the valor and self-devotion which have been
shown by the Southerners, and which, when they have submitted to the
law, will entitle them to be the fellow-citizens of freemen; a careless,
but not ungenerous, sympathy for that which, by men ignorant of the
tremendous strength of a Slave Power, was taken to be the weaker side;
the doubt really, and, considering the conflict of opinion here, not
unpardonably, entertained as to the question of State Sovereignty and
the right of Secession. All these motives, though they operate against
your cause, are different from hatred of you. But there are two points
to which in justice to my country I must especially call attention.

The first is this,--that you have not yourselves been of one mind in
this matter, nor has the voice of your own people been unanimous. No
English speaker or journal has denounced the war or reviled the conduct
of your Government more bitterly than a portion of American politicians
and a section of the American press. The worst things said in England of
your statesmen, of your generals, of your armies, of your contractors,
of your social state and character as a people, have been but the echo
of things which have been said here. If the New-York correspondents of
some English journals have been virulent and calumnious, their virulence
and their calumnies have been drawn, to a great extent, from the
American circles in which they have lived. No slanders poured by English
ignorance or malevolence on American society have been so foul as those
which came from a renegade American writing in one of our Tory journals
under the name of "Manhattan." No lamentations over the subversion of
the Constitution and the destruction of personal liberty have been
louder than those of your own Opposition. The