been for the escape-valve of emigration hither?  If ever a situation appealed to the noblest sympathies of mankind, ours does.  Struggling to maintain a government which has given to the poor man fuller rights and freer exercise of labor than he has ever before known on this earth; fighting heroically to uphold the best republic ever realized;—­who would have dreamed that ‘brave, free, honest Old England’ would have regarded us coldly, sneered at our victories, grinned over our defeats?  But more than this.  Though not avowed as an aim, and though secondary to our first great object,—­the reestablishment of the Union and a constitutional government,—­we all know, and so does every Englishman, that the emancipation of the slave, to a greater or less degree, must inevitably follow our success.  Here comes the test of that English abolition of the blackest and fiercest stamp which has for years been avowed in Great Britain, and which has done as much as aught else towards stirring up this foul rebellion.  Where be your gibes now, O Britannia?  Where be your bitter jeers against the ‘lying Constitution,’ against the ‘stars for the white man and the stripes for the negro,’ against everything American, because America was the land of the slave?  We are fighting—­dying—­to directly uphold ourselves, and indirectly to effect this very emancipation for which you clamored; we are losing cotton and suffering everything;—­but you, when it comes to the pinch, will endure nothing for your boasted abolition, but slide off at once towards aiding the inception of the foulest, blackest, vilest slaveocracy ever instituted on earth!  Disguise, quibble, lie, let them that will—­these are facts.  Because we, in our need, have instituted a protective tariff, which was absolutely necessary to keep us from utter ruin, and on the flimsy pretext that we are not fighting directly for emancipation, proud, free, and honest Old England, as publicly represented, eats all her old words, and, worse than withholding all sympathy from us, shows in a thousand ill-disguised ways an itching impatience to aid the South!  Men of England, we are suffering for a principle common to all humanity; can not you suffer somewhat with us?  Can you not, out of the inexhaustible wealth of your islands, find wherewithal to stave off the bitter need, for a season, of your cotton-spinners?  Feed them?—­why we would, for a little aid in our dire need, have poured in millions of bushels of wheat to your poor,—­one brave, decided act of sympathy on your part for us would ere this have trampled down secession, and sent cotton to your marts, even to superfluity.  Or, were you so minded, and could ‘worry through’ a single year, you might raise in your own colonies cotton enough, and be forever free of America.

Or is it really true, as many think, that your statesmen would gladly dismember this Union?  The suggestion reveals such a depth of infamy that we will not pause on it.  Let it pass—­if the hour of need should come we will revive it, and out of that need will arise a giant of Union such as was never before dreamed of.  Let the country believe that, and from Maine to California there will be such a blending into one as time can never dissolve!