that unhallowed structure with which this nineteenth century is to be outraged, if treason has its way?  Where is Dickens, the hater of the lesser wrongs of Chancery Courts, the scourge of tyrannical beadles and heartless schoolmasters?  Has he no word for those who are striving, bleeding, dying, to keep from spreading itself over a continent a system which legalizes outrages almost too fearful to be told even to those who know all that is darkest in the record of English pauperism and crime?  Where is the Laureate, so full of fine indignations and high aspirations?  Has he, who holds so cheap those who waste their genius

  “To make old baseness picturesque,”

no single stanza for the great strife of this living century? is he too busy with his old knights to remember that

  “One great clime.... 
  Yet rears her crest, unconquered and sublime,
  Above the far Atlantic?”

has he a song for the six hundred, and not a line for the six hundred thousand?  Where is the London “Times,” so long accepted as the true index of English intelligence and enlightened humanity?  Where are those grave organs of thought which were always quarrelling with Slavery so long as it was the thorn in the breast of our nation, but almost do homage to it now that it is a poisoned arrow aimed at her life?  Where is the little hunchback’s journal, whose wit was the dog-vane of fashionable opinion, once pointing towards freedom as the prevailing wind seemed to blow, now veered round to obey the poisoned breath of Slavery?  All silent or hostile, subject as they are themselves to the overmastering influence of a class which dreads the existence of a self-governing state, like this majestic Union, worse than falsehood, worse than shame, worse than robbery, worse than complicity with the foulest of rebellions, worse than partnership in the gigantic scheme which was to blacken half a hemisphere with the night of eternal Slavery!

It is the miserable defection of so many of the thinking class, in this time of the greatest popular struggle known to history, which impresses us far more than the hostility of a few land-grasping nobles, or the coldness of a Government mainly guided by their counsels.  The natural consequence has been the complete destruction of that undue deference to foreign judgments which was so long a characteristic of our literature.  The current English talk about the affairs that now chiefly interest us excites us very moderately.  The leading organs of thought have lost their hold upon the mind of most thinking people among us.  We have learned to distrust the responses of their timeserving oracles, and to laugh at the ignorant pretensions of their literary artisans.  These “outsiders” have shown, to our entire satisfaction, that they are thoroughly incompetent to judge our character as a community, and that they have no true estimate of its spirit and its resources.  The view they have taken of the strife in which we have been and are engaged is not only devoid of any high moral sympathy, but utterly shallow, and flagrantly falsified by the whole course of events, political, financial, and military.