t crowds us with materials.

Foremost among the grievances which we at the North may allege against
our brethren across the water--foremost, both in time and in the harmful
influence of its working--we may specify this fact, that the English
press, with scarce an exception, made haste, in the very earliest stages
of the Southern Rebellion, to judge and announce the hopeless partition
of our Union, as an event accomplished and irrevocable. The way in which
this judgment was reached and pronounced, the time and circumstances of
its utterance, and the foregone conclusions which were drawn from it,
gave to it a threatening and mischievous agency, only less prejudicial
to our cause, we verily believe, than would have been an open alliance
between England and the enemies of the Republic. This haste to announce
the positive and accomplished dissolution of our National Union was
forced most painfully upon our notice in the darkest days of our opening
strife. Those who undertook to guide and instruct English opinion in
the matter had easy means of informing themselves about the strangely
fortuitous and deplorable, though most opportune and favoring
combination of circumstances under which "Secession" was initiated and
strengthened. They knew that the Administration, then in its last days
of power, was half-covertly, half-avowedly in sympathy and in active
cooperation with the cause of rebellion. The famous "Ostend Conference"
had had its doings and designs so thoroughly aired in the columns of the
English press, that we cannot suppose either the editors or the readers
ignorant of the spirit or intentions of those who controlled the policy
of that Administration. Early information likewise crossed the water to
them of the discreditable and infamous doings and plottings of members
of the Cabinet, evidently in league with the fomenting treachery. They
knew that the head of the Navy Department had either scattered our
ships of war to the ends of the earth, or had moored them in helpless
disability at our dockyards,--that the head of the War Department had
been plundering the arsenals of loyal States to furnish weapons for
intended rebellion,--that the head of the Treasury Department was
purloining its funds,--and that the President himself, while allowing
national forts to be environed by hostile batteries, had formally
announced that both Secession itself and all attempts to resist it were
alike unconstitutional,--the effect of whic