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IMPERIAL AVARICE.
brought new methods, but the animus of the British nation is substantially the same as that of her great prototype.
The severest loss with which the "Mistress of the Seas" ever met, was that of her American colonies. The result of it was a feeling of mortification which deepened into envy when the stability of our republic became assured. For twenty-five years after the Revolution, England annoyed us by every means in her power. She impressed our seamen; she injured our commerce; she incited the Indians to butchery on our frontiers. An inglorious war of two years served to deepen her chagrin—a war in which our coast was ravished, our marine destroyed and our capital laid in ashes; but as a fitting finale she suffered an ignominious defeat after consenting to a treaty of peace.
The latent feeling of hatred toward this country did not again bud forth until the breaking out of the rebellion. While our government did not ask or desire foreign assistance, she had a right to expect that other nations would hold themselves aloof from the contest. Moreover, since the struggle was logically and manifestly for the perpetuity or destruction of slavery—that solitary stain on our fair escutcheon—for Great Britain to espouse the cause of the South was to antagonize every tradition and every precept by which she professed to be guided. Yet what was the action of England in that sanguinary struggle? With fiendish delight she gloated on the prospect of a partition of the Union. She encouraged the Southern states in secession. She acknowledged them a belligerent power; she furnished them the munitions of war—ay! even lent her seamen to man the cruisers that almost swept our merchant marine from the ocean.
The sympathies of the nobility, the clergy,the literati and the press were on
the side of the South, and the hope that the disruption of the Union might be an accomplished fact was not disguised. The London Times, which is at once the exponent and creator of British sentiment this giant of journalism prostituted its columns to maligning the North and extolling the South. Its biased reports and editorials inspired an unfavorable sentiment against us throughout Europe. But for the encouragement of these English leaders this long, internecine conflict would have been a mere transient episode on the page of history. It is remarkable that but one magnate in that great realm manifested sincere friendship for the North, and he was a foreigner. This was the noble Prince Consort, who died in the early years of our struggle.
Let Great Britain indemnify us with millions for spoliation on the high seas; let her banquet our distinguished citizen; let her join in celebrating her own humiliation on the sands of Yorktown; yet she can never make reparation for the countless lives destroyed in a war prolonged through aid and comfort; nor atone for acts of malevolence where neutrality would have been the part of decency.
Let us turn from this retrospect and briefly contemplate her policy toward her own subjects. The wails of Ireland have been startling the ears of mankind for generation after generation. To-day her grievances remain unredressed, and her peasantry still groan under the merciless exactions of English landlords. It is interesting to reflect that the Emerald Isle has produced some of the bravest warriors, the finest poets, the most eloquent orators, the greatest statesmen the world has ever known; yet do we behold the sad spectacle of a beautiful land laid desolate, and a noble race undergoing wholesale expatriation!