some one who is neither better nor worse than himself. It is positively
mortifying to think how shockingly we have been taken in, and that the
"cordial understanding" that had, apparently, been growing up between
the two nations was a misunderstanding throughout, though we were
sincere in desiring its existence. Perhaps, when the evidences of the
strength that we possess, in spite of Secession, shall have all been
placed before the rulers of England, they will be found less ready to
quarrel with the American people than they were a month ago. A nation
that is capable of placing a quarter of a million of men in the field in
sixty days, and of giving to that immense force a respectable degree of
consistency and organization, is worth being conciliated after having
been insulted. But would any amount of conciliation suffice to restore
the feeling that existed here when the Prince of Wales was our guest? We
fear that it would not, and that for some years to come the sentiment
in America toward England will be as hostile as it was in the last
generation, when it was in the power of any politician to make political
capital by assailing the mother-land. The belief is created that England
in her heart hates us as profoundly as ever she did, that the forty-six
years' peace has produced no change in her feeling with respect to us,
and that she is watching ever for an opportunity to gratify the grudge
of which we are the object. Practically it will matter very little
whether this belief shall be well founded or not, so long as English
ministers, whether from want of judgment or from any other cause, shall
omit no occasion for the insulting and annoying of the United States. An
opinion that is sincerely held by the people of a powerful nation is in
itself a fact of the first importance, no matter whether it be founded
in truth or not; and if the blundering of another powerful nation shall
help to maintain that opinion, that nation would have no right to
complain of any consequences that should follow from its inability to
comprehend the condition of its neighbor. This country will not submit
to the degradation which England would inflict upon it, and which no
other European nation appears inclined to aid the insular empire in
inflicting. Even Spain, proverbially foolish in her foreign policy, and
seemingly unable to get within a hundred years of the present time,
observes a decorum in the premises to which Great Britain is a strange