and is likely to exceed it for a long time to come.  It is not cotton that England or France want, but customers.  How are they to obtain these?  By exasperating their best buyers beyond all reconciliation?  The day that witnesses British or French meddling in our war, sees the inauguration of such hostility to their manufactures as they little dream of.  There will be leagues formed to enforce this to the letter.  It will be treason to wear an inch of English cloth or of French silk, and what lie will they say to their starving operatives then?

Already within the past year, great advances have been made in manufacturing, especially in silks.  A little closing of us up would be the worst experiment for England that she ever yet tried.  She may possibly get cotton from the South, but not a customer from the North.  You may lead a horse to water, but it is another affair to make him drink.  And no one who can recall the prompt resolve not to use English goods, and the beginning of leagues to that effect, of which we lately heard so much, can doubt that in case we hear much more of this impertinence of intervention, the American market would immediately be lost to the insolent meddlers.  It is only of late that the free States have shaken off their Democratic, pro-slavery, anti-tariff tyrants, and learned to be free.  England has groaned and howled at our freedom; now she goes so far as to threaten; but unless she soon stop that, we shall promptly show her where the strength lies.  While we were under a half-Southern, half-British tyranny, we could do nothing.  And be it remembered that from the days of the New-York Plebeian, when British gold was spent literally by the million in this country, to strengthen the Democratic party and build up free trade, slavery and English interests always went hand in hand to oppress the interests of American free labor.  But we shall soon change all that.  It is in our power to chastise British impudence most effectually, and we shall probably soon be called upon to do it, by buying nothing from abroad.

The inhuman, inconsistent, and cynically selfish conduct of England toward the North in this war, whenever we have been threatened by reverses, should not be forgotten.  It has been literally devilish in its grossness and meanness.  Whatever wickedness the South has been guilty of was at least barefaced and bold.  The South had not for years labored to build up an Abolition party in the North, as England did.  For well nigh half a century has England howled, wailed, whined, and canted over slavery; but at the first pinch of the pocket, away goes the previous philanthropy, and John Bull stands revealed, the brutal, cruel, treacherous, lying savage that he is at heart, under all his aristocratic feudal trash and gilding.  Well, we know him at last, and will remember him.  His conduct toward us has put hay on his horns—­foenum habet in cornu—­and we shall avoid him.  Let the manufacturers of