tell of a gamekeeper killed in an affray on his father’s estate in that county.  For the offense one man was hanged, and four men are now on their way to penal colonies.  Six families are thus deprived of husband and father, that this wretched system of game-preserving may be continued in a country densely peopled as this is.  The Marquis of Normanby’s gamekeeper has been murdered also, and the poacher who shot him only escaped death by the intervention of the Home Secretary.  At Godalming, in Surrey, a gamekeeper has been murdered; and at Buckhill, in Buckinghamshire, a person has recently been killed in a poaching affray.  This insane system is the cause of a fearful loss of life; it tends to the ruin of your tenantry, and is the fruitful cause of the demoralization of the peasantry.  But you are caring for the rights of property; for its most obvious duties you have no concern.  With such a policy, what can you expect but that which is now passing before you?

It is the remark of a beautiful writer that “to have known nothing but misery is the most portentous condition under which human nature can start on its course.”  Has your agricultural laborer ever known anything but misery?  He is born in a miserable hovel, which in mockery is termed a house or a home; he is reared in penury:  he passes a life of hopeless and unrequited toil, and the jail or the union house is before him as the only asylum on this side of the pauper’s grave.  Is this the result of your protection to native industry?  Have you cared for the laborer till, from a home of comfort, he has but a hovel for shelter? and have you cherished him into starvation and rags?  I tell you what your boasted protection is—­it is a protection of native idleness at the expense of the impoverishment of native industry.

FROM THE SPEECH ON NON-RECOGNITION OF THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY (1861)

I advise you, and I advise the people of England, to abstain from applying to the United States doctrines and principles which we never apply to our own case.  At any rate, they [the Americans] have never fought “for the balance of power” in Europe.  They have never fought to keep up a decaying empire.  They have never squandered the money of their people in such a phantom expedition as we have been engaged in.  And now, at this moment, when you are told that they are going to be ruined by their vast expenditure,—­why, the sum that they are going to raise in the great emergency of this grievous war is not greater than what we raise every year during a time of peace.

They say they are not going to liberate slaves.  No; the object of the Washington government is to maintain their own Constitution and to act legally, as it permits and requires.  No man is more in favor of peace than I am; no man has denounced war more than I have, probably, in this country; few men in their public life have suffered more obloquy—­I had almost said, more indignity—­in consequence