“The people,” as Mr. Motley has said, in one of his official letters, “everywhere sympathize with us; for they know that our cause is that of free institutions,—­that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy.”  We have evidence that this is partially true of the British people.  But we know also how much they are influenced by their political and social superiors, and we know, too, what base influences have been long at work to corrupt their judgment and inflame their prejudices.  We have too often had occasion to see that the middle classes had been reached by the passions of their superiors, or infected by the poison instilled by traitorous emissaries.  We have been struck with this particularly in some of the British colonies.  It is the livid gleam of a reflected hatred they shed upon us; but the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence, and we feel sure that the British inhabitants of an African cape or of a West-India islet would not have presumed to sympathize with the Rebels, unless they had known that it was respectable, if not fashionable, to do so at home.  It is one of the most painful illustrations of the influence of a privileged class that the opinions and prejudices and interests of the English aristocracy should have been so successfully imposed upon a large portion of the people, for whom the North was fighting over again the battles of that long campaign which will never end until the rightful Sovereigns have dispossessed the whole race of Pretenders.

The effect of this course on the part of the mother-country has been like that of harsh treatment upon children generally.  It chills their affections, lessens their respect for the parental authority, interrupts their friendly intercourse, and perhaps drives them from the family-mansion.  But it cannot destroy the ties of blood and the recollections of the past.  It cannot deprive the “old home” of its charm.  If there has been but a single member of the family beneath its roof who has remained faithful and kind, all grateful memories will cluster about that one, though the hearts of the rest were hard as the nether millstone.

The soil of England will always be dearer to us of English descent than any except our own.  The Englishman will always be more like one of ourselves than any “foreigner” can be.  We shall never cease to feel the tenderest regard for those Englishmen who have stood by us like brothers in the day of trial.  They have hardly guessed in our old home how sacred to us is the little island from which our fathers were driven into the wilderness,—­not saying, with the Separatists, “Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome!” but “Farewell, dear England!” At that fearful thought of the invasion of her shores,—­a thought which rises among the spectral possibilities of the future,—­we seem to feel a dull aching in the bones of our forefathers that lie beneath her green turf, as old soldiers feel pain in the limbs they have left long years ago on the battle-field.