Every dynasty sees a natural enemy in a self-governing state.  Its dread of that enemy is in exact proportion to the amount of liberty enjoyed by its own people.  Freedom is the ferment of Freedom.  The moistened sponge drinks up water greedily; the dry one sheds it.  Russia has no popular legislation, and her Emperor almost, perhaps quite, loves us.  England boasts of her freeborn people, and her governing class, to say the least, does not love us.

An unexpected accident of situation startled us by the revelation of a secret which had been, on the whole, very well kept.  No play of mirrors in a story, no falling of a screen in a comedy, no flash of stage-lightning in a melodrama, ever betrayed a lover’s or a murderer’s hidden thought and purpose more strikingly than the over-hasty announcement that the Union was broken into warring fragments, never again to be joined together, unveiled the cherished hope of its Old-World enemies.  The whispers of expectant heirs at the opening of a miser’s will are decorous and respectful, compared to the chuckle of the leading English social and political organ and its echoes, when the bursting of the Republican “bubble” was proclaimed as an accomplished fact, and the hour was thought to have come when the “Disunited States” could be held up as a spectacle to the people of Europe.  A Te Deum in Westminster Abbey would hardly have added emphasis to the expression of what appeared to be the prevailing sentiment of the upper classes.

If the comparative prudence of the British Government had not tempered this exultant movement, the hopes of civilization would have been blasted by such a war as it is sickening to think of:  England in alliance with an empire trying to spread and perpetuate Slavery as its very principle of life, against a people whose watchwords were freedom, education, and the dignity of labor.  If the silent masses of the British people had not felt that our cause was theirs, there would have been no saying how far the passionate desire to see their predictions made facts might have led the proud haters of popular government.

Between these two forces the British Cabinet has found a diagonal which has met with the usual success of compromises.  The aristocracy, which very naturally wishes to see the Union divided, is in a fair way of being disappointed, because, as its partisans may claim, England did not force herself into our quarrel.  That portion of the middling classes which could not tolerate the thought of a Slave Empire has been compelled to witness a deliberate exposure in the face of the whole world of the hollowness of those philanthropic pretensions which have been so long the boast of British patriots.  The people of the Union, who expected moral support and universal indignant repudiation of the slaveholding Rebel conspiracy, have been disgusted and offended.  The Rebels, who supposed Great Britain, and perhaps France also, would join them in a war which was virtually a crusade against free institutions, have been stung into a second paroxysm of madness.  Western Europe failed us in the storm; it leaves them in the moment of shipwreck.