thought
of England. It is to that thought, to that spirit of lofty humanity
and pure justice, that Garibaldi appeals in his address to the English
people from his prison,--an appeal which seems utterly ludicrous, if
you think of it as addressed to the historic John Bull, but which is
perfectly intelligible and appropriate, if you remember that Sir Philip
Sidney was an Englishman as well as George IV., and that John Stuart
Mill is no less English than Lord Palmerston or Russell. It is with that
spirit that American civilization is truly harmonious. But there is the
other, merely trading, short-sighted, selfish spirit, which is typified
by the coarse John Bull of the pictures, and which has touched almost to
a frenzy of despair Carlyle in the "Latter-Day Pamphlets" and Tennyson
in "Maud." That is the dominant England of the hour. That is the England
which lives at the mercy of rivals. And that is the England which,
consequently, with feverish haste, proclaims equal belligerence between
the leaders of an insurrection for the extension and fortification of
slavery and the nation which defends its existence against them. That
is the England whose prime-minister alleges that a friendly power has
authorized an insult, while at the very moment in which he speaks he
carries in his pocket the express disclaimer of that power. That is
the England which incessantly taunts and reviles and belies a kindred
people, whose sole fault is that they were too slow to believe their
brothers parricides, and who were credulous enough to suppose that
England loved not only the profit, but the principle, of Liberty under
Law."

"It is very sad; but it certainly seems so," said I.

"Seems, my dear friend? nay, it is," ticked my watch, persistently. "It
is the inevitable penalty of national deterioration which any people
must pay that in its haste to be rich forgets to secure its actual
independence. Thus Richard Cobden, the most sagacious of English
statesmen, is the most unflinching apostle of peace, because he knows
that England has put it out of her power to go to war. I saw you reading
his late argument against a blockade. Did you reflect that it was really
an argument against war? 'How absurd,' he cries, 'that a commercial
nation, which lives by imports and exports, paying for the one by the
other, should, by shutting up ports in which it wishes to buy and sell,
cut its own hands and feet off, and so bleed to death!' 'In a commercial
natio