overnment meaning no evil might easily be led astray. Among its results
we may hope that this revolution will give birth to a better system of
International Law. Would there were reason to hope that it might lead to
the erection of some high tribunal of justice among nations to supersede
forever the dreadful and uncertain ordeal of war! Has the Government of
England, in any case where your right was clear, really done you a
wrong? If it has, I trust that the English nation, temperately and
respectfully approached, as a proud nation requires to be, will surely
constrain its Government to make the reparation which becomes its honor.

But let it not be forgotten, that, in the worst of times, at the moment
of your lowest depression, England has refused to recognize the
Confederate States, or in any way to interfere in their behalf; and that
the steadiness of this refusal has driven the Confederate envoy, Mr.
Mason, to seek what he deems a more hospitable shore. The inducement of
cotton for our idle looms and our famishing people has been a strong one
to our statesmen as well as to our people, and the Tempter has been at
their side. Despotism, like Slavery, is necessarily propagandist. It
cannot bear the contagion, it cannot bear the moral rebuke, of
neighboring freedom. The new French satrapy in Mexico needs some more
congenial and some weaker neighbor than the United Republic, and we have
had more than one intimation that this need is felt.

And this suggests one closing word as to our blockade-running. Nothing
done on our side, I should think, can have been more galling, as nothing
has been so injurious to your success. For myself, in common with all
who think as I do on these questions, I abhor the blockade-runners; I
heartily wish that the curse of ill-gotten gain may rest on every piece
of gold they make; and never did I feel less proud of my country than
when, on my way hither, I saw those vessels in Halifax sheltered under
English guns. But blockade-running is the law; it is the test, in fact,
of an effective blockade. And Englishmen are the blockade-runners, not
because England as a nation is your enemy, but because her merchants are
more adventurous and her seamen more daring than those of any nation but
your own. You, I suspect, would not be the least active of
blockade-runners, if we were carrying on a blockade. The nearness of our
fortresses at Halifax and Nassau to your shores, which makes them the
haunt of blo