things, the propriety and advantage of your being represented
in both houses of Congress, the injustice of taxation without
representation. I admit the importance of every one of these
considerations, but I think you are laboring under some misapprehension
of the actual state of affairs. I know not if any of you have been in
America since the spring of 1861, or whether (as I rather suspect) you
have all been busy in Europe endeavoring to--but I beg pardon, I did
not intend to say anything that should recall old animosities. But
intelligence is slow to arrive in any part of the world, and
intelligence from America painfully so in reaching Europe. You do not
seem to be aware that _something has happened here during the last
four years_, something that has made a very painful and lasting
impression on the memory of the American people, whose voice on this
occasion I have the honor to be. They feel constrained to demand that
you shall enter into bonds to keep the peace. They do not, I regret to
say, agree with you in looking upon what has happened here of late as
only a more emphatic way of settling a Presidential election, the
result of which leaves both parties entirely free to try again. They
seem to take the matter much more seriously. Nor do they, so far as I
can see, agree with you in your estimate of the importance of
conserving your several state sovereignties, as you continue to call
them, insisting much rather on the conservation of America and of
American ideas. They say that the only thing which can individualize or
perpetuate a commonwealth is to have a history; and they ask which of
the States lately in rebellion, except Virginia and South Carolina, had
anything of the kind? In spite of my natural sympathies, gentlemen, my
reason compels me to agree with them. Your strength, such as it was,
was due less to the fertility of your brains than to that of your soil
and to the invention of the Yankee Whitney which you used and never
paid for. You tell me it is hard to put you on a level with your
negroes. As a believer in the superiority of the white race, I cannot
admit the necessity of enforcing that superiority by law. A Roman
emperor once said that gold never retained the unpleasant odor of its
source, and I must say to you that loyalty is sweet to me, whether it
throb under a black skin or a white. The American people has learned of
late to set a greater value on the color of ideas than on shades of
complexion.