and other benevolences
inflicted on the Boers. These pictures and descriptions were to be shown
and taught to every American rebel child forever so as to burn into
their minds eternal hatred and a struggle without end against the
independence hating British brute.

Just at the close of the revolution Franklin was preparing to have
thirty-five of these pictures designed and engraved in France "in
order," as he wrote to an Englishman, "to impress the minds of children
and posterity with a deep sense of your bloody and insatiable malice and
wickedness." If Franklin could apply such adjectives to England's
comparatively mild attempts to suppress a rebellion, what would he say
to-day of her worse than inhuman efforts to destroy two independent
nations. Franklin believed that the success of our revolution had
destroyed forever the inherent cruelty and despotic brutishness of the
English tory. But the tory has gone on developing; and even the English
liberal has less of the courage, intelligence and character which were
such a brilliant and saving grace to him in the days of Burke, Chatham
and Barre.

I shall now consider what you say about the action of General Lee and
the leaders of the confederacy. You assume that they were struggling for
independence; and that is most extraordinary. It is an insult, as it
seems to me, to the intelligence of the whole American people. I never
before heard our civil war described in that way. That Lee or the
confederacy were struggling for independence in the sense in which the
American colonists of 1776, or the Boers of to-day or the Swiss or the
Irish struggled for that object I most positively deny. If Lee and the
confederacy had been struggling in that sense the civil war would not
yet be over. The eleven southern states would be now either independent
or in the condition of Ireland.

First of all the southern states were not a naturally separate people.
They were contiguous territory. There was no natural boundary dividing
them from the North. They were of the same race, language and social
status as the north. They had taken part with the north in making the
whole country independent of England and with the north they had made
the National Constitution.

They had quarrelled with the north simply about the question of slavery.
At one time they had disapproved of slavery in the abstract as much as
the north did; but as their slaves were more profitable than slaves in
the north they