chief enemies of your
honor have been those of your own household. The crime of a great mass
of our people against you has, in fact, consisted in believing
statements about America made by men whom they knew to be Americans, and
did not know to be disloyal to the cause of their country. I have seen
your soldiers described in an extract from one of your own journals as
jail-birds, vagabonds, and foreigners. I have seen your President
accused of wishing to provoke riots in New York that he might have a
pretence for exercising military power. I have seen him accused of
sending to the front, to be thinned, a regiment which was likely to vote
against him. I have seen him accused of decoying his political opponents
into forging soldiers' votes in order to discredit them. What could the
"Times" itself say more?

The second point is this. Some of your journals did their best to
prevent our people from desiring your success by declaring that your
success would be followed by aggression on us. The drum, like strong
wine, is apt to get into weak heads, especially when they are
unaccustomed to the sound. An Englishman coming among you is soon
assured that you do not wish to attack Canada. Apart from considerations
of morality and honor, he finds every man of sense here aware that
extent of territory is your danger, if you wish to be one nation,--and
further, that freedom of development, and not procrustean
centralization, is the best thing for the New as well as for the Old
World. But the mass of our people have not been among you; nor do they
know that the hot words sedulously repeated to them by our Southern
press are not authentic expressions of your designs. They are doubly
mistaken,--mistaken both in thinking that you wish to seize Canada, and
in thinking that a division of the Union into two hostile nations, which
would compel you to keep a standing army, would render you less
dangerous to your neighbors. But your own demagogues are the authors of
the error; and the Monroe doctrine and the Ostend manifesto are still
ringing in our ears. I am an adherent of the Monroe doctrine, if it
means, as it did on the lips of Canning, that the reactionary influence
of the old European Governments is not to be allowed to mar the hopes of
man in the New World; but if it means violence, every one must be
against it who respects the rights of nations. When you contrast the
feelings of England towards you with those of other nations, Italy fo