and power would be of any
avail to resist a foreordained catastrophe.--In these three harmful
ways of influence, the ill-omened opinion reiterated from abroad had
a tendency to fulfil itself. The whole plea of justification offered
abroad for the opinion is given in the assertion that those who have
once been bitterly alienated can never be brought into true harmony
again, and that it is impossible to govern the unwilling as equals.
England has but to read the record of her own strifes and battles and
infuriated passages with Scotland and Ireland,--between whom and herself
alienations of tradition, prejudice, and religion seemed to make harmony
as impossible as the promise of it is to these warring States,--England
has only to refresh her memory on these points, in order to relieve us
of the charge of folly in attempting an impossibility. So much for the
first grievance we allege against our English brethren.

Another of our specifications of wrong is involved in that already
considered. If English opinion decided that our nationality must
henceforth be divided, it seemed also to imply that we ought to divide
according to terms dictated by the Seceders. This was a precious
judgment to be pronounced against us by a sister Government which
was standing in solemn treaty relations with us as a unit in our
nationality! What did England suppose had become of our Northern
manhood, of the spirit of which she herself once felt the force? There
was something alike humiliating and exasperating in this implied advice
from her, that we should tamely and unresistingly submit to a division
of continent, bays, and rivers, according to terms defiantly and
insultingly proposed by those who had a joint ownership with ourselves.
How would England receive such advice from us under like circumstances?
But we must cut short the utterance of our feelings on this point, that
we may make another specification,--

Which is, that our English critics see only, or chiefly, in the fearful
and momentous conflict in which we are engaged, "a bursting of the
bubble of Democracy"! Shall we challenge now the intelligence or the
moral principle, the lack of one or the other of which is betrayed
in this sneering and malignant representation--this utter
misrepresentation--of the catastrophe which has befallen our nation?
Intelligent Englishmen know full well that the issue raised among us
does not necessarily touch or involve at a single point the principle