som of the North itself there was a serpent, coiled but not
sleeping, which only listened for the first word that made it safe to
strike, to bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and blend its golden
scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile of the cotton-fields.
Who would not wish that he were wrong in such a suspicion? yet who can
forget the mysterious warnings that the allies of the rebels were to be
found far north of the fatal boundary line; and that it was in their own
streets, against their own brothers, that the champions of liberty were
to defend her sacred heritage?

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had
suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish
the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves on
the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud
labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of
freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands
of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.

Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere, and
to humanity. You have only to see who are our friends and who are our
enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are combating.
We know too well that the British aristocracy is not with us. We know
what the West End of London wishes may be result of this controversy.
The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the shears,
threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will sooner or later cut
into shreds the old charters of tyranny. How they would exult if they
could but break the rivet that makes of the two blades one resistless
weapon! The man who of all living Americans had the best opportunity of
knowing how the fact stood, wrote these words in March, 1862: "That Great
Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our domestic trial in
struggling with a monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to
abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to master it, and then
become the only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect
way possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably be the verdict
made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of the evidence."

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at the
Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not less than
those which vexed his illustrious grandfat