venient attendant of love and respect, that they do induce
sensitiveness. A brother or father turning against one in the hour of
trouble, a friend sleeping in the Gethsemane of our mortal anguish, does
not always find us armed with divine patience. We loved England; we
respected, revered her; we were bound to her by ties of blood and race.
Alas! must all these declarations be written in the past tense?

But that we may not be thought to have over-estimated the popular tide
against us, we shall express our sense of it in the words of an English
writer, one of the noble few who have spoken the truth on our side.
Referring to England's position on this question, he says:--

"What is the meaning of this? Why does the English nation, which has
made itself memorable to all time as the destroyer of negro slavery,
which has shrunk from no sacrifices to free its own character from that
odious stain, and to close all the countries of the world against the
slave-merchant,--why is it that the nation which is at the head of
Abolitionism, not only feels no sympathy with those who are fighting
against the slaveholding conspiracy, but actually desires its success?
Why is the general voice of our press, the general sentiment of our
people bitterly reproachful to the North, while for the South, the
aggressors in the war, we have either mild apologies or direct
and downright encouragement,--and this not only from the Tory and
anti-Democratic camp, but from Liberals, or _soi-disant_ such?

"This strange perversion of feeling prevails nowhere else. The public of
France, and of the Continent generally, at all events the Liberal part
of it, saw at once on which side were justice and moral principle, and
gave its sympathies consistently and steadily to the North. Why is
England an exception?"

In the beginning of our struggle, the voices that reached us across the
water said, "If we were only sure you were fighting for the abolition of
slavery, we should not dare to say whither our sympathies for your cause
might not carry us."

Such, as we heard, were the words of the honored and religious nobleman
who draughted this very letter which you signed and sent us, and to
which we are now replying.

When these words reached us, we said, "We can wait; our friends in
England will soon see whither this conflict is tending." A year and a
half have passed; step after step has been taken for Liberty; chain
after chain has fallen, till the march of o