pirit of their press and of their leading public men calculated to
rouse a just indignation, and to cause a permanent estrangement on the
part of any nation capable of self-respect, and sensitively jealous, as
ours then was, of foreign interference. Was there nothing in the
indecent haste with which belligerent rights were conceded to the
Rebels, nothing in the abrupt tone assumed in the Trent case, nothing in
the fitting out of Confederate privateers, that might stir the blood of
a people already overcharged with doubt, suspicion, and terrible
responsibility? The laity in any country do not stop to consider points
of law, but they have an instinctive perception of the _animus_ that
actuates the policy of a foreign nation; and in our own case they
remembered that the British authorities in Canada did not wait till
diplomacy could send home to England for her slow official tinder-box to
fire the 'Caroline.' Add to this, what every sensible American knew,
that the moral support of England was equal to an army of two hundred
thousand men to the Rebels, while it insured us another year or two of
exhausting war. It was not so much the spite of her words (though the
time might have been more tastefully chosen) as the actual power for
evil in them that we felt as a deadly wrong. Perhaps the most immediate
and efficient cause of mere irritation was, the sudden and unaccountable
change of manner on the other side of the water. Only six months before,
the Prince of Wales had come over to call us cousins; and everywhere it
was nothing but 'our American brethren,' that great offshoot of British
institutions in the New World, so almost identical with them in laws,
language, and literature,--this last of the alliterative compliments
being so bitterly true, that perhaps it will not be retracted even now.
To this outburst of long-repressed affection we responded with genuine
warmth, if with something of the awkwardness of a poor relation
bewildered with the sudden tightening of the ties of consanguinity when
it is rumored that he has come into a large estate. Then came the
Rebellion, and, _presto!_ a flaw in our titles was discovered, the plate
we were promised at the family table is flung at our head, and we were
again the scum of creation, intolerably vulgar, at once cowardly and
overbearing,--no relations of theirs, after all, but a dreggy hybrid of
the basest bloods of Europe. Panurge was not quicker to call Friar John
his _former_ f