the
sender in England. The tax thus imposed on our own people, in the
prosecution of this postal war, will amount to $178,586 a year, no small
burden upon a subject of taxation so sensitive as postage, and no trifling
obstruction to the intercourse between the two countries, and between the
emigrants who find a refuge on our shores and the friends they have left
behind. Such a stoppage is peculiarly to be regretted at this juncture,
when the number of emigrants is so rapidly increasing, and all the
interests of humanity seem to require the utmost freedom and facility of
intercourse between the United States and the European world.

The proposed bill is intended as a retaliatory measure, and perhaps
nothing can be devised more severe in the way of retaliation. It is worthy
of inquiry, however, whether there may not be found "a more excellent
way," by means of cheap postage on the ocean as well as on the land. It
does not appear but that Great Britain can stand the impost of double
postage as easily and as long as we can. But let our government open its
mails to carry letters by steam packet between Europe and America for TWO
CENTS, and I do not see how Great Britain can stand that. She must
succumb. A man who thought he had been injured and was meditating plans of
revenge, happened to open his Bible and read the counsel of the wisest of
human rulers,--"If thine enemy hunger, feed him, and if he thirst, give him
drink, for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head." The man
mused a few minutes, and then rose and clapped his hands, and said, "I'll
burn him." Without touching the merits of the controversy as to which did
the first wrong, I must say that the course of the British government, in
exacting 1_s._ per letter on the mails of the American steamers bound to
Germany, for barely touching at the port of Southampton, is the most
_gouging_ affair of any governmental proceeding within my knowledge. It
seems to me that our own government would do itself honor by adopting
almost any expedient, rather than imitate so bad an example, in this age
of the world, as to lay a tax amounting to a prohibition, upon the
interchange of knowledge and the flow of the social affections among
mankind. It is submitted that the establishment of Ocean Penny Postage by
our mail steamers, with an offer of perfect reciprocity to all other
countries adopting the same policy, will be quite consistent with our
national honor. With the i