A nation which has made the professions that England has, does not with impunity, under however great provocation, betake itself to frustrating the objects for which it has been calling on the rest of the world to make sacrifices of what they think their interest.  At present all the nations of Europe have sympathized with us; have acknowledged that we were injured, and declared with rare unanimity, that we had no choice but to resist, if necessary, by arms.  But the consequences of such a war would soon have buried its causes in oblivion.  When the new Confederate States, made an independent Power by English help, had begun their crusade to carry negro slavery from the Potomac to Cape Horn; who would then have remembered that England raised up this scourge to humanity not for the evil’s sake, but because somebody had offered an insult to her flag?  Or even if unforgotten, who would then have felt that such a grievance was a sufficient palliation of the crime?  Every reader of a newspaper, to the farthest ends of the earth, would have believed and remembered one thing only—­that at the critical juncture which was to decide whether slavery should blaze up afresh with increased vigor or be trodden out at the moment of conflict between the good and the evil spirit—­at the dawn of a hope that the demon might now at last be chained and flung into the pit, England stepped in, and, for the sake of cotton, made Satan victorious.

The world has been saved from this calamity, and England from this disgrace.  The accusation would indeed have been a calumny.  But to be able to defy calumny, a nation, like an individual, must stand very clear of just reproach in its previous conduct.  Unfortunately, we ourselves have given too much plausibility to the charge.  Not by anything said or done by us as a Government or as a nation, but by the tone of our press, and in some degree, it must be owned, the general opinion of English society.  It is too true, that the feelings which have been manifested since the beginning of the American contest—­the judgments which have been put forth, and the wishes which have been expressed concerning the incidents and probable eventualities of the struggle—­the bitter and irritating criticism which has been kept up, not even against both parties equally, but almost solely against the party in the right, and the ungenerous refusal of all those just allowances which no country needs more than our own, whenever its circumstances are as near to those of America as a cut finger is to an almost mortal wound,—­these facts, with minds not favorably disposed to us, would have gone far to make the most odious interpretation of the war in which we have been so nearly engaged with the United States, appear by many degrees the most probable.  There is no denying that our attitude towards the contending parties (I mean our moral attitude, for politically there was no other course open to us than neutrality) has not been that which becomes a