“It shows us that you doubt us,” an American says, with an air of injured honor—­or did say, before that Trent affair.  “And it is done to express sympathy with the South.  The Southerners understand it, and we understand it also.  We know where your hearts are—­nay, your very souls.  They are among the slave-begotten cotton bales of the rebel South.”  Then comes the whole of the long argument in which it seems so easy to an Englishman to prove that England, in the whole of this sad matter, has been true and loyal to her friend.  She could not interfere when the husband and wife would quarrel.  She could only grieve, and wish that things might come right and smooth for both parties.  But the argument, though so easy, is never effectual.

It seems to me foolish in an American to quarrel with England for sending soldiers to Canada; but I cannot say that I thought it was well done to send them at the beginning of the war.  The English government did not, I presume, take this step with reference to any possible invasion of Canada by the government of the States.  We are fortifying Portsmouth, and Portland, and Plymouth, because we would fain be safe against the French army acting under a French Emperor.  But we sent 2000 troops to Canada, if I understand the matter rightly, to guard our provinces against the filibustering energies of a mass of unemployed American soldiers, when those soldiers should come to be disbanded.  When this war shall be over—­ a war during which not much, if any, under a million of American citizens will have been under arms—­it will not be easy for all who survive to return to their old homes and old occupations.  Nor does a disbanded soldier always make a good husbandman, notwithstanding the great examples of Cincinnatus and Bird-o’-freedom Sawin.  It may be that a considerable amount of filibustering energy will be afloat, and that the then government of those who neighbor us in Canada will have other matters in hand more important to them than the controlling of these unruly spirits.  That, as I take it, was the evil against which we of Great Britain and of Canada desired to guard ourselves.

But I doubt whether 2000 or 10,000 British soldiers would be any effective guard against such inroads, and I doubt more strongly whether any such external guarding will be necessary.  If the Canadians were prepared to fraternize with filibusters from the States, neither three nor ten thousand soldiers would avail against such a feeling over a frontier stretching from the State of Maine to the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Erie.  If such a feeling did exist—­if the Canadians wished the change—­in God’s name let them go.  It is for their sakes, and not for our own, that we would have them bound to us.  But the Canadians are averse to such a change with a degree of feeling that amounts to national intensity.  Their sympathies are with the Southern States, not because they care for cotton, not because they are