owing to the national half-sightedness, and their habit of
trusting to a few leading minds for their public opinion) to judge when
that prosperity is really threatened.

If the English were accustomed to look at the foreign side of any
international dispute, they might easily have satisfied themselves that
there was very little danger of a war at that particular crisis, from
the simple circumstance that their own Government had positively not an
inch of honest ground to stand upon, and could not fail to be aware of
the fact. Neither could they have met Parliament with any show of a
justification for incurring war. It was no such perilous juncture as
exists now, when law and right are really controverted on sustainable or
plausible grounds, and a naval commander may at any moment fire off the
first cannon of a terrible contest. If I remember it correctly, it was a
mere diplomatic squabble, which the British ministers, with the politic
generosity which they are in the habit of showing towards their official
subordinates, had tried to browbeat us for the purpose of sustaining an
ambassador in an indefensible proceeding; and the American Government
(for God had not denied us an administration of Statesmen then) had
retaliated with stanch courage and exquisite skill, putting inevitably a
cruel mortification upon their opponents, but indulging them with no
pretence whatever for active resentment.

Now the Lord-Mayor, like any other Englishman, probably fancied that War
was on the western gale, and was glad to lay hold of even so
insignificant an American as myself, who might be made to harp on the
rusty old strings of national sympathies, identity of blood and
interest, and community of language and literature, and whisper peace
where there was no peace, in however weak an utterance. And possibly his
Lordship thought, in his wisdom, that the good feeling which was sure to
be expressed by a company of well-bred Englishmen, at his august and
far-famed dinner-table, might have an appreciable influence on the grand
result. Thus, when the Lord-Mayor invited me to his feast, it was a
piece of strategy. He wanted to induce me to fling myself, like a lesser
Curtius, with a larger object of self-sacrifice, into the chasm of
discord between England and America, and, on my ignominious demur, had
resolved to shove me in with his own right-honorable hands, in the hope
of closing up the horrible pit forever. On the whole, I forgive his
Lo